


Give Me Hope

by CenturyUnited



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Mentions of Sex, Slow Burn, also danny dies, as usual, author cant write for shite, basically a huge mess, but likes their dynamic, just lots and lots of feelings yanno, very slow burn really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22884286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CenturyUnited/pseuds/CenturyUnited
Summary: John Smith and Clara Oswald have been strange friends for years.  Things fall apart when Danny Pink dies, and neither of them are adept at effectively coping with death. Through coincidence, shared pain, and warm moments of slow understanding and forgiveness, they'll forge a way to love people again, including each other.
Relationships: Clara Oswin Oswald/Danny Pink, Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 35
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yo!! I don't have a beta for this, but if anyone's interested, just let me know. I'm always happy to bounce my ideas off of someone who is likely more competent than me.

Clara was never quite sure how she had ended up in Liverpool. When she was younger, she had always thought she’d end up in London, or some other place that was much further from her home in Blackpool. After her mum had died, she had spent her days dreaming of living out her life in Brighton or Dover, all the way in the opposite corner of England. For a short while, she had even thought about leaving the country altogether, but after a very short stint in Scotland at the age of eighteen, she had decided that the blunt and cold nature of the people from the North was not for her. And yet, somehow, after all the dreaming and the scheming, she still ended up in Liverpool, barely an hour’s drive away from her childhood home.

When she had moved into her first shitty flat at the age of twenty-three, Clara had very genuinely hated the fact that she had landed herself in Liverpool. She had still felt overwhelmed by her proximity to her father’s new marriage and the old memories of her mum, and she didn’t feel like the distance was great enough to get away from it all.

Nevertheless, the change of scenery had helped and things had gotten better as time passed, especially as she became better friends with her flatmates and made connections with people at work. These days, all she could feel was a sense of gratitude for having avoided ending up in Manchester. Or Leeds. She shuddered to think of ending up _there_. Yes, Liverpool was a much more attractive option.

Now, she was surprisingly happy in the city that she had come to think of as home. She still had flatmates at the age of twenty-eight and her job didn’t pay as much as she would like, but she had a loving boyfriend and great friends and an acceptable distance from her dad and Linda.

“Are we still on for drinks tonight?” A male voice with a soft west country accent startled her out of her thoughts.

 _Danny_. Her beloved Danny. Clara thought that he may very well be her favorite part of Liverpool.

“Of course we are!” She turned to grab his arm and kissed him on the cheek before they each went their separate ways in the school hallway. In response to their innocent display of affection, she heard some of her students giggle and whisper amongst themselves and couldn’t stop herself from smiling.

Danny had been so endearingly awkward when she had first asked him out. Now, when she thought about his newly developed confidence and comfort with their relationship, she couldn’t help but feel a little bit giddy. Frankly, she felt that her ex-soldier, maths-teacher boyfriend was perfect for her. He put up with her crazy antics and her hyperactive need for control while somehow managing to slow her down and keep her grounded.

As Clara made her way into her classroom, she pondered their development of mutual trust. At this point, she was fairly certain Danny knew everything bad that there was to know about her and her life.

“Clara, where did you put my soldering iron?”

Well, _nearly_ everything, anyway.

As soon as she saw her wild, gray-haired companion kneeling on the floor and rooting around her desk, Clara turned back towards the door and quickly shut it. She did _not_ need her students gossiping about a strange, older man making himself at home in her classroom.

“John! What the bloody hell are you doing in here? How did you even get into the school?”

“Easily. Everyone who works here is a pudding brain. Now, can you answer my question? I was supposed to modify the motherboard for some boring mob guy’s computer last week, but I forgot, and now he’s sending his men around to harass me. Unimaginative slob.”

“What?? John, you cannot honestly be insinuating that you’ve come to hang about a secondary school while you’re being followed by some _mob_ _men_. Are you out of your wits? You’re putting my students in danger!”

Clara instantly started to pace in front of her desk as John continued to pull drawers out and throw things on the floor. In what she assumed was a response to the genuine irritation and panic in her voice, he peaked out over the edge of her desk and sighed as he watched her begin to shake her hands about.

“Calm down. I made absolutely sure they lost my trail very early this morning. Everything will be back to normal mediocrity at this school very soon. I just need my soldering iron.”

Nodding to herself, she rushed around her desk and pushed him out of the way before he made even more of a mess out of her immaculate organization system. His eyebrows raised in indignation, but before he could say anything, she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out his soldering iron. Looking remarkably pleased at having gotten what he came for, he took it from her hand and quickly stood up. Without saying anything else, he dramatically turned and ran out the door.

Danny knew about basically everything in her life, but he did _not_ know about John. No one knew about John, really. Clara wasn’t ever quite sure how to talk about him to other people. Yes, he was one of her best friends, in a weird, we-don’t-really-talk-about-our-lives kind of way, but describing him that way to others seemed somehow wrong. Amy and Bill were her best friends, and that title suited them perfectly. They were her flatmates, and they talked about everything, ate junk food together, took care of each other when supremely drunk, snipped at each other about dishes and hair in the shower, painted each other’s nails, and occasionally helped each other out with rent. With John, friendship was more about depending on someone who understood that, on the inside, you were just a little bit crazy and lonely and hurt by previous loss. Not that they ever talked about it. They never did.

Clara took a deep breath and went about reorganizing her stuff. She would have to talk to John later about boundaries and work and his flippant attitude towards his own safety. For now though, she had students to teach, and she was remarkably good at that.

\---

Walking back to her flat with her hand in his, Clara felt herself warm from the inside out. They had been walking in a companionable silence since they had left their usual pub, enjoying the nice weather they were having for a spring night in May.

“Summer break is coming up fairly soon. Do you have any plans?” Danny bumped her with his shoulder.

“Nah, I don’t have anything planned. Though I’ll probably go to Blackpool for a bit to say hi to my gran and my dad.”

“Would you want to go somewhere with me? I was thinking maybe we could go on holiday to Brighton. I know you’ve always wanted to go.”

Clara felt a wave of genuine affection rush through her at the thoughtfulness of the suggestion. She had never made it to that part of England, and she was surprised that he had remembered what she was sure were only fleeting comments about her past desires to live there. As they made it to her building’s front stoop, she turned to him and pulled his face down for a tender kiss. They held each other in a warm embrace before Clara pulled back and nodded.

“I would love to go to Brighton with you, Daniel Pink. I love you.”

“I love you too, Clara.” He smiled the brightest smile she thought she’d ever seen.

Giving him one last quick kiss, Clara turned, made her way up the steps, and opened her building’s front door. Once she made it inside her flat, she leaned back against the door and bit her lip with a small smile on her face. She giggled quietly to herself as she thought about her splendid night out. She couldn't wait to share the news with Amy. As their biggest supporter, she would freak out.

“PE walks weird. Did you ever notice he doesn’t walk like anyone else? Why is he teaching children PE if he can’t even walk?”

And just like that, Clara was yanked back down from her happy euphoria by a voice that was altogether too familiar. Her heart raced in her chest and she fought to breathe through her sudden fright as she flipped on the lights.

“Christ, John! You _really_ can’t just show up like this. You know other people live here.”

“So? They’re out.”

“How long have you been sitting around here in the dark? Why are you even here? Didn’t you have some computer thing or other to make?”

“I modified the pudding brain’s motherboard in under an hour. It was extremely easy. One of your students could have done it. Probably would have learned more doing that than sitting in a classroom.”

Ah, one of John Smith’s patented talents: only answering the questions that he wanted to answer. Sod the rest of them. Clara had gotten used to this frankly infuriating habit and was now less bothered by his evasive nature. John was not good at communication. In fact, he was atrocious with interpersonal interactions in general. Clara said nothing as she went about making them both tea. He would come out and say what he needed to if he so desired, and if he didn’t, she had a list of issues she wanted to talk about anyway.

As she dropped the seventh sugar cube into her Scottish friend’s drink, she heard him clear his throat. She turned to watch him shift about on her sofa, looking like he was fighting with himself about whatever it was he was trying to express. Suddenly, he turned to look at her, and she stared into his eyes from across the room.

Sometimes, their ability to communicate nonverbally scared her. He was such an intense person, and in these quiet moments, she felt like maybe she was an anchor to his floating soul. He rarely ever understood other people’s emotions, always running about wildly from one thing to the next, always being rude and brilliant and arrogant beyond belief. He rarely understood her emotions either, but it was in these moments of quiet intensity that she felt they understood each other best. Yes, he was an absolute git most of the time, but she knew that he hurt.

He broke their eye contact and grunted quietly to himself about “pudding brains” and “PE” and “relationship drama”.

She sat down in the armchair next to the sofa and handed him his disgustingly sweet tea as she thought about how she wanted to have this conversation.

“Listen. What you did at school today? You can’t do that. You can’t just show up at my place of work and look through my stuff and potentially frighten the students or put them in danger. You can’t just show up at my flat and sit around in the dark, waiting for me to get home without letting me know that you’re going to be around beforehand. What if I had brought Danny back up here with me? What would I have had to do to explain your random presence in my home? How could I ever possibly explain the fact that you have a key to my place, not only to Danny, but to my actual flatmates? We need boundaries, John.”

“I already told you, those kids were fine. I had lost those harebrained mobsters without any problems. No one was in danger.”

“You can never know that for certain! If someone had followed you in, those children would have been put at risk, and I would have been responsible.”

“Don’t be daft, you would not have been responsible.”

Clara shot him a furious glare.

“I won’t do it again.”

“Okay. What about my flat?”

“What about it?”

“You can’t just come in here whenever you like. I gave you that key as a symbol of trust, just like you gave me yours, but it’s not meant to be a free invitation to sit in my home whenever the mood strikes. It’s for emergencies. Amy and Bill don’t even know that anyone else has a key to this place.”

“That’s irrelevant, I always make sure no one is here when I come in.”

Clara slammed her tea down in frustration.

“John! That’s not what this is about! God, you’re infuriating.” She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “This is about you not understanding boundaries. This is my space and this is my life, and they are important to me. Don’t treat this like a non-issue.”

Clara watched John struggle and try to understand the point she was making. As he fidgeted with his empty mug of tea, she saw him attempting to genuinely comprehend what he was doing wrong. Sometimes, because he had such a preternaturally good understanding of so many other topics, she forgot that he had such a truly poor grasp on human relations. After a while, she watched him nod slightly to himself as he apparently came to a conclusion.

“Alright.”

“Okay.” They made eye contact, and Clara gave him a reassuring nod. “Now, tell me all about how you got involved in your motherboard-fixing emergency.”

John’s shoulders loosened up a bit, and he launched into what she was sure was a very overblown story involving money, screwdrivers, and serious bargaining with technology. As she listened to him go on, Clara smiled to herself. Life really _was_ great. She was soon going to go on holiday with her boyfriend, she had an unorthodox but great friendship with John, work was going well, and her friendships with Amy and Bill were as strong as ever.

Clara went to bed feeling like the luckiest woman in all of England.

\---

She hadn’t quite intended for them to meet, but after it was all said and done, she figured that it was probably inevitable.

\---

She was sitting in the passenger seat of John’s shitty car, enjoying riding around Liverpool with the windows down while listening to John’s punk playlist, when she requested a pit stop at a nearby coffee shop. As she waited for their usual order to be ready (regular flat white for her, some gross sugared-up concoction with an extra shot of espresso for John), she heard Danny’s familiar voice laughing from across the room and felt her heart skip a beat. Quickly, she ducked behind the counter, successfully diving down before she could be seen, and breathed a sigh of relief for the near-miss.

Unfortunately, as usual, the barista serving up orders called out her name. Loudly. In another panic, Clara peaked over the counter, signaling the worker to be quiet, realizing too late that it was a futile effort. She made exceedingly awkward eye contact with Danny while still crouching and stood up, trying to pretend that she had been tying her shoes.

He walked over to her.

“Clara? What are you doing here?”

“Danny! You know me, I love coffee.” Clara realized she was now awkwardly holding two travel cups and shrugged while overcompensating with a loud laugh and a smile.

“Why do you have two cups?”

“Er… Just couldn’t decide what I wanted, you know. Got ‘em both.”

Danny made a face. “Right…”

After an awkward moment of silence, she shrugged and laughed awkwardly again. “Anyway, better be letting you get on with your day! I’m going to go now.”

She then tried to run off, but before she could make it fully outside, Danny caught up to her. “Wait, Clara. Is there something going on?”

Right at that moment, John chose to make himself known by yelling out his driver’s side window while looking down at his phone.

“Hurry up, Clara! We’re going to miss it if you take any longer.”

She flinched and watched Danny arch an eyebrow. “Clara, who is that?”

Apparently exasperated with the amount of time she was taking to linger outside the shop, John opened his car door and stood, turning towards her. She couldn't see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but she saw him hesitate for a split second when he spotted Danny standing next to her.

“Oh. Hello, PE. Could you and Clara hurry this up? We’re in a bit of a rush.”

“PE? What? Who are you? How do you know Clara?”

“You can call me the Doctor.”

Clara threw John a heated glare, and watched him frown in confusion at her anger. After some extended signaling with her eyes and face, John rolled his eyes and sighed. He stepped away from his beloved car, closed its door, and approached them.

“Danny, this is John. John, Danny.”

“Yes, yes, yes. PE. Hello. Can we go now?” John desperately gestured at his very blue car. Clara felt Danny staring at her and sighed in resignation.

“Fine. Take your disgusting coffee.” John quickly took his cup from her and beat a hasty retreat back to his car.

She turned to look up at her boyfriend and saw him seriously frowning at her. He evidently did not find any part of this amusing.

“Who is that man? Your uncle or something?”

“What? No. He’s, er… he’s an old friend.”

“Why does he call me PE? He must be like twice your age. How did you two even meet?”

“Listen, it’s a bit complicated, but I promise that he’s mostly harmless. He’s just a friend. I promise I’ll explain later.” She grabbed and squeezed his hand, attempting to reassure him with a warm touch.

John honked his horn. Danny glared in the direction of the car.

“Fine, but I don’t like him, Clara.”

“You don’t know him, Danny. Sorry, but I’ve got to go.” With another squeeze to his hand, she turned and rushed back into the passenger seat of the ‘TARDIS’.

\---

After a number of extended conversations with Danny regarding the nature of her friendship with John, the perceived animosity between the two main men in her life began to settle down. Danny was clear in his trust of Clara, and while he told her he wasn’t going to stop her from doing whatever it was that she did with the older Scot, he also made it perfectly clear that he didn’t trust him. It was a point of contention for a while, but eventually, Clara decided that it was irrelevant whether or not Danny trusted John as long as he trusted _her_ fully and completely.

Things with John, as expected, were a little less straightforward. He initially resented Danny for messing up the way they went about business as usual, and he blamed her boyfriend for her new demarcation of personal and professional boundaries. They argued about it extensively, and for a short while, Clara and John did not see nor hear from each other. Eventually though, they both cooled off, and they once again began to hang out at coffee shops and live music pubs and university lectures and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and as many weird outdoors spots as they could find.

Clara felt like she should have known that her attained level of peace couldn’t last.

Everything turned to shit two weeks before Danny and herself planned to leave for their holiday in Brighton. She had been talking to him on the phone about their holiday plans and what they should be packing and how much she loved him when she heard the screeching tires.

The moments that followed became a bit of a blur.

She remembered calling Amy and Bill and blindly running through the streets of Liverpool until she found his body, his poor body, sprawled out on the street. She had the image etched into her mind. Her beautiful and wonderful Danny Pink, rendered so so ugly by the shape of his oddly bent and broken legs, by the blood seeping from the injury on the side of his head, but most of all by the empty look of his cold dead eyes.

She screamed and raged at the world. How could anyone deprive this planet of Danny Pink? Her caring, gentle, disciplined boyfriend. Gone.

She spent the next few weeks in her room. She barely ate and rarely showered and really didn’t talk to anyone except for the occasional check-in from Bill and Amy. Her dad constantly called, but she never picked up. John was curiously absent throughout the whole ordeal, but Clara hardly even noticed. She didn’t think of much other than Danny, anyway.

\---

School had just started again when she heard from John for the first time since Danny’s passing. The text she had received showed no indication that he was acknowledging her current state of affairs, and for a split second, Clara was absolutely furious. But then she thought about the pity and the sorrow and the soft, sad looks that she received from everyone else, and decided that she felt somewhat relieved.

Clara genuinely thought she could handle being around John again, but she was horribly wrong. She knew that she and John were tightly bound by mutual experiences of dealing with loss, but she was very wrong in assuming that coping (or not coping, in his case) with past loss and dealing with a very recent death were going to be the same. For some reason, Clara was fine with John’s evasive nature when it came to handling past loss, but she couldn’t stand his complete aversion to talking about it when it came to Danny’s death. She somehow felt simultaneously grateful that John tried to talk to her about matters that had nothing to do with her dead boyfriend and also fully incensed that he thought he didn’t have to talk to her about it directly or really address the issue.

Inevitably, she just lost it.

John had insisted on taking them to the Peak District National Park in his beloved blue car one Saturday morning because, as he said, they were predicted to have great weather, and if they timed it just right, they could see the summer sunset stretch on for miles out there. While frankly not in the mood, Clara had agreed and had sat in his car without saying much for the ninety minute trip.

She snapped practically as soon as they got there.

“So if we take that trail off to the right, we should be able to reach the ridge I was talking about earlier. It’s going to be quite the sight, especially becau-”

“Are you fucking kidding me, John?”

He whipped around to look at her with his eyebrows raised in shock. After a few seconds, his face settled into a somber expression, but he didn’t say anything in response to her question.

“Do you think you can just bring me out here and pretend that nothing is wrong? That Peak District National Fuck is going to make up for the fact that I never got to go on holiday with my boyfriend because he fucking died? That I can’t stand the sight of just about anything because I can’t stop myself from thinking that he should be the person who sees all the amazing things in the world? That I literally cannot sleep anymore because I won’t ever get Danny back?”

Again, John stayed silent.

“Say something! Do something, John! God knows that’s all you’re good for. Running about and causing problems and fixing them and blabbering on about absolutely nothing important while the rest of us have to deal with real life.”

John looked down at his boots and leaned back onto his car. Clara hated that he looked like he had expected her to lose it while he stayed calm.

“You know what, John? Fuck you. You don’t get to stand there and judge me about the way that I’m dealing with the death of my boyfriend. At least I deal with it! At least I acknowledge that he’s gone! Can you say the same? Do you even think about the fact that your wife is dead?”

At this comment, John’s eyes shot right to hers with a look of such restrained fury that Clara forgot to breathe for just a moment.

“Don’t.”

“Why? What kind of worthless doctor are you, anyway? You run around with all this knowledge and brilliance, but what good is that worth? You can’t bring Danny back. You couldn’t even save your wife.”

“Clara, you need to take a breather.”

“No, John. You really, _really_ don’t get to tell me what to do. You and your stupid car.”

Having gotten a brilliant idea to make him hurt right alongside her, Clara turned around and looked for something to throw. Spotting a large rock on the ground, she picked it up with both hands, rapidly turned around, and threw it at John’s precious ‘TARDIS’. It shattered the passenger side window.

Satisfied with the look of shock and hurt crossing John’s face, Clara turned around to pick up something else.

“Clara, stop. Put it down.”

“No.”

She threw another rock at his car and broke one of its headlights.

“Do as you’re told, and put it down.”

“No.”

Using a sizable stick she’d found on the ground, she knocked off one of the car’s side mirrors. John was getting visibly angry.

“You don’t understand what you’re doing. Stop.”

“No!”

Using another massive rock, she simultaneously shattered his shitty windshield and took down his rearview mirror, where she knew John kept a picture of his late wife. Realizing what she’d just done, Clara fell to the ground and began to cry.

It started to rain.

“Are you happy now? Did that selfish display of destruction make you feel better?”

“I’m so sorry, John.”

He looked down at her in a mixture of compassion and anger and disappointment. “No. You’re not.”

It hurt to see him look at her like that. It hurt to see his sadness. And it _really_ hurt to know that he was right. Naturally, Clara lashed out.

“You are such a smug bastard. Go away. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

He stood staring at her for what seemed like hours before finally speaking. “I hope you’re happy some day, Clara.”

He got into his battered car and drove away, leaving her hurting on the wet ground.

\---

For weeks after having destroyed his car, she stubbornly refused to reach out to him. Her pride and a pervasive sense of embarrassment stopped her from trying to communicate in any way for quite a while. Eventually though, she got over it and tried to give him a call. When she finally did, she learned that the number she had been calling and texting for years had been randomly disconnected.

She pretended that she wasn’t absolutely crushed.

Another week went by in a depressive haze before she realized that she still had her key to his place. Fueled by the idea of seeing him again and finally apologizing, Clara rushed to his home straight from work. Without paying attention or bothering to knock, she burst into his foyer laughing, ready to call out his name, only to stop dead in her tracks upon realizing that the place was practically empty. All his books and records and tools were gone. The only things that remained were some empty shelves, unused chalk, and a layer of dust.

Clara didn’t see John again for a very long time.


	2. Chapter 2

John was fairly certain that he had been seeing Clara his whole life.

Not in weird hallucinations or demented dreams or premonitions or any of that other silly rubbish. No, John Smith had been seeing the real-life Clara Oswald since about the age of twenty-eight. Or, at least, that was when he thought it had started.

In an attempt to be near River, he had been working as a questionable busker in York right after finishing his PhD in astrophysics. He had been madly in love at the time, and he hadn’t cared that his doctorate studies in cosmology were being wasted while his girlfriend had fun at archeological digs. At twenty-eight, playing his shitty guitar on a street corner in front of a family restaurant had seemed an acceptable compromise to make in the name of love.

The first time that the freshly minted Dr. John Smith saw Clara was in York.

A couple, who had seemed to be not much older than him, carrying a chubby-cheeked toddler with a round face, had just been leaving the restaurant at his back when someone had run up to steal his donation jar. Before the person had successfully gotten their hands on it, though, the little girl in the couple’s arms had squealed and pointed in what had seemed to be a lot of indignation for such a small human. John had turned towards the man with the nefarious intentions and shooed him away. By the time that he had turned back around to thank the couple and their kid, though, they had disappeared.

John could never quite explain why he knew, deep down in his bones, that that little girl had been Clara; he just knew.

\---

He also knew that he didn’t see her again until about ten years later, when he was working alongside his then-wife River at the University of Oxford.

One odd weekend, he had been sitting in a small bookshop in Steventon, waiting for River to be done having lunch with one of her many colleagues, when he had seen a little girl walk in by herself. John never cared much for people, or interacting with them, but he made exceptions for River and for children. Too much of an awkward, antisocial Scot to ask the girl why she was on her own, he had decided he would instead watch her out of the corner of his eye while he messed about the shop to make sure no one would bother her.

John remembered his conversation with that little, round-faced girl remarkably clearly.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be writing in the pages of the books in here.” She had sounded so singularly self-assured.

“Why ever not? This one is rubbish, I’m just fixing it.”

“That’s Sense and Sensibility!”

John had been taken aback by the degree of displeasure that the girl had been able to put into so few words and such a small frame.

“Well it certainly lacks enough of the former to make its title unsuitable.”

“This is where Jane Austen was born! If you don’t like her work, why are you here?”

“I’m a professor at Oxford. Pretty close to this place.”

“Well, maybe someone like you shouldn’t teach.”

“You’re quite opinionated for an eight year old.”

“I’m twelve, and you’re rude. Don’t write in the books.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Shortly after their exchange, a bubbly woman John had presumed to be the child’s mum had walked in to collect her. They had left together, hand-in-hand, but not before the girl had turned to give John a final look of warning.

He had continued writing in the books as soon as they were gone.

\---

Roughly six years after the book incident, John saw Clara for the third time. He remembered this instance far more vividly than most simply because it had happened during the hardest year of his life.

Having moved back to his home city of Glasgow to help River go through chemo, John had been dealing with quite a lot at the time. The doctors (the real ones, anyway) had been painfully clear on River’s limited chances of going into remission after another round of chemo and radiation, but she had insisted that they go ahead with it anyway because that had been her nature. A fighter and a rebel til the end.

John had both hated her and loved her for it.

One night, he had been at the pub around the corner from the hospital getting absolutely pissed when he had been kicked out for being disorderly. He had been having a breakdown, crying in an alley next to the pub, when a short woman who couldn’t have been older than eighteen stumbled upon him.

He hadn’t even bothered to pretend that he had been doing anything other than letting his sorrow take up space in his lungs and his eyes and his hunched back. His fear over the possibility of losing the only person in the world who understood him, his absolute horror at the idea of living in a world where he no longer had his River had forced the air out of his body and crushed his chest, making it hard for him to fill up his lungs.

The girl had just continued to stand there, a look of understanding on her face. She hadn’t said anything as she had approached him in the dark. She had only held up her cigarettes.

He had taken one.

They had each silently smoked a cigarette in an alley in Glasgow, one thinking about the hole left in the world by the loss of a mother, the other dreading the pain that would come from losing a spouse.

Somehow, the cigarette had helped him to breathe. The round-faced girl had seemed to know that it would.

Even then, he had known that he would never be the same after River.

\---

The fourth time that John saw Clara, she had been hauling a duffel bag towards the Glasgow Central Train Station.

River had already died.

With the loss of his only true connection to it, John had effortlessly fallen away from the world of the living, ignoring everything and everyone. He had barely even noticed the fact that the young woman walking down the street had looked at him with vague recognition and infinite sadness.

\---

Practically as soon as River had died, John had run away from Glasgow. He hadn’t been able to handle being there anymore. For years, he had run from one city to the next, constantly crossing the border between Scotland and England and even crossing into Wales two or three times.

The fifth time John ran into Clara, he had been hiding out in London.

It was a relatively insignificant run-in. It had happened in the South Kensington tube station. He had been trying to get into the station without having to use an Oyster card, as he had lost his, when he had seen a frankly tiny hand pass a card through for him.

Slightly numbed by surprise, John had walked through and handed the Oyster card back to its owner.

The very short woman wearing an Imperial College London sweatshirt had barely looked up when she had taken her card from his hand. She had quickly passed through herself and then rushed off to wherever she had been going.

It had been two years since his life had fallen apart, but John had sworn in that moment that he had felt the smoke of shitty cigarettes coating his tongue and filling his lungs.

\---

After a few more years, John had eventually decided that running from city to city wasn’t financially practical. He had never been the money-matters kind of man and had always left those duties and concerns to River, but as his funds had continued to dwindle, he had realized that he needed to manage those things on his own. He still hated it.

Eventually, John had decided that he would settle down in Liverpool. At least on a somewhat long-term basis. In the back of his head, he had felt the need to keep moving around, but he had known that running from city to city would not really help with the pain. It moved around with him, and John had known that it always would.

So, Liverpool it was.

John had chosen the city randomly to some degree. He had visited when he had been a university student because one of his peers had practically forced him to go to a football match. The match had been perfectly dreadful. However, John _did_ have fond memories of wandering the city at night on his own.

He had gone to the Cavern Club on Mathew Street to feel like he would be sharing time and space with the Beatles, had drunkenly stood and stared at the “four lads who shook the world” sculpture, and had eaten the saltiest, most delicious chips he’d ever had standing outside of Nabzy’s. He had even gotten one of his ears pierced in Liverpool, the little punk bastard that he had thought he was.

In the end though, John had chosen the city because it was where he had been hiding out when he came to the conclusion that he no longer had enough money to aimlessly run around Britain.

It was shortly after having made this decision that John saw Clara for the first time since London.

He had been running away from a terrifyingly large snake that he had accidentally let loose in the southern end of Sefton Park, incoherently yelling about dinosaurs and their stupid descendants, when he saw her exiting the nearby cafe. They had made very awkward eye contact, but he couldn’t stop his running, lest the sneaky creature chasing him around in the grass caught up to him.

By the time he had caught the snake and looked back up towards the cafe, she had been long gone. He hadn’t really thought much about it then, aside from the fact that this woman had become impossibly common in his strange, spread-out life.

\---

After having seen her two more times within a year, John had come to the conclusion that they had both recently moved to Liverpool. Somehow, the round-faced woman with the expressive eyes always managed to pop up at the most inconvenient moments of his life.

Run-in number seven had involved her bumping into him getting drunk on a bench during what used to be his and River’s wedding anniversary. She had looked at him in much the same way that the girl who had shared her cigarettes back in Glasgow had looked at him, and John had been hit with such an intense sense of deja-vu that he nearly vomited from its reeling effects. He hadn’t wanted to think about that year of his life. She had walked off, never having stopped in her tracks.

Run-in number eight had been equally as unfortunate, if less somber. John had been fighting off some imbecilic, good-looking jock trying to rob a local convenience store using nothing but the spoon that he had accidentally placed in his coat pocket that morning. It would have been embarrassing if John believed in violence and weapons, but he never had, so he had been perfectly comfortable whipping out nothing but a beat-up utensil. The impossible stranger who walked through his life ended up calling the local police on her way to work. She hadn’t seen John, but she had seen the commotion and had decided to help out by calling in the professionals. He had spotted her doing it from across the street.

He had vowed to approach her if he ever saw her again.

\---

Unfortunately, the next three times that he had seen her, Clara had been otherwise engaged.

\---

Five months after the spoon situation, John had been playing his beat-up electric guitar at a hole-in-the-wall pub near Birkenhead Park. The owner of the establishment, Nardole, had been paying him just enough to make the gig worth his while, so he had been playing there every Thursday and Friday for about a month.

One of these Thursday nights, as John had been playing through his usual eclectic mix, he had looked up and seen his familiar stranger putting her orders in at the bar. He had nearly stopped playing on the spot, but he had seen Nardole shoot him a nasty look from his corner in the back. John had rolled his eyes.

He had never really cared what Nardole did or thought, despite what he had sometimes let the bald-headed man believe, so he had decided that he would stop playing anyway. He had been a split second from placing his guitar on its stand when he had watched her sit down in a booth across from a bloke in a leather jacket with big ears and very short hair. The pair of them had laughed and smiled brightly as apparently life was just bloody fantastic.

John had refocused on his guitar, and she had left without noticing him.

\---

Two months after that, John had walked into the coffee shop across the street from his home and had witnessed a gangly, tall man with terribly wild, brown hair placing an order for “anything that has bananas in it: coffee, smoothie, tea, muffins. Oh, yes, muffins!! I’d like five banana muffins, please.”

John remembered feeling irritated at the idea that someone actually thought that there was such a thing as as banana-flavored coffee. He still thought that such an abomination of a drink should be considered a crime.

After having placed and received his simple order of coffee with seven sugars and plenty of milk (much better than banana coffee, thank you very much), John had sat down at his usual corner to continue his work on hacking into the physics department at the University of Liverpool. He had only just started typing away on his old laptop when the man with the pin-stripe suit and crazy hair had walked up beside him and tried to give him tips on his code.

John had been about to very generously dole out his opinion on this person's pudding brain but had been rudely interrupted by a voice calling out the man’s name.

The younger man had looked up at him and shrugged, leaving to go join his female companion, who just so happened to be tiny and made up entirely of large, expressive eyes set into a face that could have been considered just a bit too wide.

\---

The eleventh time that John had seen Clara, he had just turned fifty-two. He really only remembered because it had been his birthday.

He had been walking down Smithdown Road, thinking about all of the disparaging comments that River would have made about his now-fully-gray hair and how old he was and how weak and skinny he looked, and just generally being melancholy and broody, when he saw her again.

He had looked up and happened to see her kissing a man with a head full of brown hair who was wearing braces and a tweed jacket with elbow patches and a bloody _bowtie_. She had been about to take a tumble after tripping on her very high heels, but the man had caught her before she fell, saying something ridiculously daft like “geronimo”, which she had evidently found funny and charming as she had laughed and pulled him into a kiss.

It had only served to remind him how much his weary soul still ached at the gaping hole that River had left in his life.

He had gone home alone and barely slept at all, just as he had done every day since his wife’s death.

\---

The twelfth time, she had walked up to him.

“Did you know that this city has over half a million people living in it?”

John had been taken entirely by surprise. It hadn’t been him that had spotted her that time. “Er… no.”

“I googled it once. I just thought, what are the chances that I run into one specific man three or four times in vastly different locations and at different times all over the city?”

He hadn’t responded. He had been too busy thinking about the fact that her count had been off. It hadn’t been three or four times, it had been twelve. Seven times in Liverpool alone. He suspected that his eyebrows had done what they usually did when he let them have free reign and that he had been aggressively frowning.

“I’m Clara Oswald.” She had held out her hand.

“You’re the impossible woman.” She had tilted her head in confusion at his honestly bizarre response, and he had blushed when he realized that he had said it out loud. “I’m, er… the Doctor. Or well, sorry. John Smith.”

They had strongly (on her part) and very awkwardly (on his part) shaken hands.

She had stared at him for a full minute with a look of amused patience on her face before he had realized that she had been waiting for him to say something.

“Er, would you like to get coffee? Or chips? Or coffee and chips?”

She had smiled so brightly at his lack of social finesse that John had felt some part of his soul become just a fraction lighter.

“Coffee. Let’s do coffee.”

And so it was that John Smith had been seeing Clara Oswald his whole life.

They simply hadn’t met until sighting number twelve.


	3. Chapter 3

Christmas after Danny had died and John had disappeared had been extremely depressing.

Despite the fact that Amy and Bill had gone out of their way to make her feel comfortable and loved throughout the holidays, Clara had still felt trapped and frustrated and sad. She had spent Christmas day back in Blackpool with her family, and she had enjoyed seeing her dad and her gran, but it had all been tainted by Linda and her haughty and insensitive comments.

This year, Clara decided that she would travel for the Christmas holiday. No invasive questions from her family, no well-intentioned smothering from her friends, and no need to attend any frankly dismal holiday parties with co-workers and the like. This year, Clara just wanted to be on her own and try to ignore the fact that it would be only the second Christmas since Danny’s passing.

Despite the fact that she had made the bold proclamation that she would never return to the dreary country back when she was eighteen, Clara now found herself in Scotland for the holidays. Because she really didn’t know very much about the country, aside from what little she had learned from Amy and John and what she remembered from her short time in Glasgow, she had decided that she wanted to spend the holidays in Edinburgh. It was a city that wasn’t terribly large, but it had enough going on that Clara thought she probably wouldn’t get bored without being overwhelmed.

Clara had initially considered Inverness, as that was where Amy was from, but she had quickly changed her mind when she thought about the isolation that would come as a result of being in a small town during the holidays. Glasgow had been her other option, if choosing from the places where her Scottish friends grew up, but Clara didn’t want to spend the holidays in a city that would remind her of the fact that she had not seen John in over a year. She couldn’t decide if being surrounded by a sea of people that had the same accent as him would be disheartening or oddly comforting, but she hadn’t wanted to risk it.

As it was now, she found herself in a relatively small flat that she had rented from a friend of a colleague back at school. It was drafty and creaky, but it was well-located near the University of Edinburgh and provided all the basics that she would need: a bed, a shower, and a small kitchenette. She looked forward to spending her days reading and drinking tea.

Before settling in for her first night in Scotland, Clara wandered out to find her nearest shop so that she could buy the essentials. Fortunately for her, the flat she was staying in was practically right around the corner from a Tesco metro. Rushing inside from the freezing weather, she grabbed a basket to pile in bread, milk, tea, and the like.

She enjoyed wandering about the small supermarket, as it was clear that she was located close to the city’s university. All around her were young people buying things like crisps and sweets and anything containing caffeine, talking about the stress of exams and their plans for the upcoming holiday. As she took it all in, though, one particular conversation suddenly caught her attention.

“Why do you think he has people call him ‘the Doctor’? Doesn’t it seem a bit pretentious?”

“I don’t know. No one really seems to know his full name. Anyway, who cares? He knows his stuff, and his lectures are great. Even if he has absolutely no idea how to talk about anything other than science.”

“I s’pose. I have to study for his final exam, now that you mention it.”

“Good luck, mate. The Doctor definitely doesn’t mess about. You should have heard...”

The two students had wandered out into the street before Clara could catch any more of their conversation. She had to focus on taking deep breaths as her heart beat loudly in her chest.

It couldn’t be who she was thinking it was, could it? It sounded like him, but what were the chances that he had ended up in Edinburgh and become some sort of professor? What were the chances that they would end up in the same city?

 _Oh God_ , did he come to Scotland to get away from her? She had definitely told him about her childish promise to never return when they had first met. Had he thought she was serious? Was she being daft?

There was a perfectly good chance that they weren’t even talking about John. She needed to calm down. She was just paranoid about running into him because she was in his home country and emotions were naturally running high because of the holiday season. She was staying in a flat that was very close to a university, of course there would be students around talking about awkward science professors!

Clara took a deep breath and calmed down.

As she walked back towards her temporary place, hauling her bags full of stuff, she realized just how ridiculous she had been in the supermarket. It wasn’t John. She had just wanted it to be him.

She sighed once she made it back inside. She wondered what that excitable stick insect was up to now.

\---

It was Christmas Eve, about a week after she had initially arrived in Edinburgh, when Clara felt her breath physically wrenched from her lungs.

She had been feeling fairly positive about her decision to escape to Scotland for the holidays. She hadn’t been facing any active reminders of Danny, she had been talking to her gran over the phone, and she had even had the chance to FaceTime her roommates. It didn’t feel lonely and it didn’t feel suffocating. Sure, there were people that she still wished were around like her mum and Danny and John, but overall, she felt that she had made an excellent decision in choosing Edinburgh for her holiday. The change of scene had been doing her worlds of good.

Then she saw something that she genuinely thought she would never see again.

While walking down the street, having chosen to take a stroll in the older part of the city to take in her surroundings and the lights and such, she almost literally ran into the ‘TARDIS’. She had been looking up at a tall spire, not paying attention to where she was walking, when she caught herself a split second before bumping into the familiar blue car. For a moment, Clara thought she had been hallucinating or that she had mistaken some random blue car for the beloved vehicle of her estranged friend. But the ‘TARDIS’ was truly unmistakeable. She could even see the faintest reminders of the damage she’d done to it.

Her breath vacated her body, and her heart jumped up into her throat, effectively choking off her voice and her airways. If the car was here, that meant that its owner was here, too. Clara’s head whipped about, trying to take her surroundings in all at once, but she was becoming dizzy and panicked and she feared that she might pass out.

She did. Right in the middle of a side street in Edinburgh, on Christmas Eve, Clara fainted and her body hit the sidewalk. If she had been conscious, she would have been so mad at herself for not being able to control her emotions when faced with one of the biggest mistakes she had ever made. But most of all, she would have been infuriated and humiliated at the fact that she had fainted where she was sure he would find her. That was just her luck.

\---

When she came to, Clara was on a sofa in an unfamiliar room. In her gut, she knew where she was. Or more accurately, she knew who owned the space, regardless of geographical location.

Before opening her eyes more fully, Clara fought with herself. She absolutely hated the storm of emotions that tore through her at the thought of having to confront John again for the first time in about fifteen months, give or take. For a series of fleeting moments, she felt emotions that were so much at odds with each other that it was beginning to make her nauseous.

She felt excited and elated. One of her dearest friends, whom she had missed so much that it had physically ached, was near at hand. All she had to do was open her eyes and greet him. She yearned to see what their time apart had done to his hair or the lines on his face or his scrawny build or his sense of style (or lack thereof). She wanted to make eye contact with him. She wanted to feel like his anchor once again. She wanted to be the focus of his intense, mercurial eyes. She needed to know if he had missed her, too.

She felt fierce anger. She had never quite gotten over their last interaction. Yes, she had acted like a bit of a beast, but she had been _hurting_. She had been hurting, it had felt like her life was ripping apart at the seams, and he had only stood there and looked at her in grief. She had always known he was bad at dealing with certain emotions, but they had been friends for years. She had expected more from him. She still had nightmares of being left at that national park, on her knees, crying in the rain. She needed to know if he was angry with her, too.

She felt sad, and she felt guilty. John had always come off as standoffish, but she knew he was practically alone in the world. They had never really talked about it, but she knew that he had been alone since his wife had died. She hurt for him. She was weighed down by a physical ton of guilt. Guilt for having betrayed him so fully and so heartlessly. Guilt for having demanded that he never see her again, leaving him drifting once again in the world, without an anchor to keep him tied down to anything. She felt so much sadness for having missed a year of his life, for having missed out on his painfully tender smiles and his awkward hugs. She needed to know if he felt sad and guilty, too.

Trying to come to terms with the whirlwind of emotions ripping through her, Clara decided that there really only remained one option to deal with it all. She had to see him. She had to talk to him. She had to forgive and apologize and rebuild.

Having made up her mind, Clara blinked her eyes officially open and slowly sat up.

“Merry Christmas, Clara Oswald.”

Clara hadn’t really been prepared for what hearing his voice would do to her. It was surreal. After not having heard his voice in so long, it felt so strange to actually _hear_ it. Sure, she had imagined talking to him countless times in the past year, but hearing his voice in her head and in her dreams was so _different_ than feeling it hit her eardrums.

It sent a shiver down her spine. She shook her head to refocus. It had come from behind her, so she slowly turned around.

She took her time in soaking in all the details.

The first thing she noticed was his hair. What used to be a short-cropped cut that was kept mostly in-check had turned into a full head of salt-and-pepper curls, clearly unbrushed and untamed. She liked the curls more. She hadn’t even known that his hair was that curly. The next thing that she noticed was that his look had shifted from being formal and proper (although magician-like) to something softer and more unceremonious. He was wearing tartan trousers under what seemed like four layers of shirts and jumpers. He hadn’t lost the red-lined pea coat or the brogue boots, though, and she felt herself smile at that. Some things never changed.

Physically, he seemed just as much of a stick insect as ever. Tall build, narrow shoulders, skinny chest, knobby knees, hollow cheeks. Floppy earlobes, crazy eyebrows, defined frown, downturned lips. All endearingly familiar.

Finally, Clara built up the courage to make eye contact with him.

She had nearly forgotten how adept they had become at nonverbally communicating. She swallowed past the lump that formed in her throat. _God_. She really had missed his ever-changing eyes. In that very moment, his eyes seemed like a turbulent storm of gray and blue, drowning her in their pain and sorrow and distance.

It gave her whiplash. He seemed so similar to how she remembered him physically, that when she saw how much his eyes had changed, she was nearly sent reeling.

The eyes that, even when angry or confused or sad, used to look at her and let her peacefully swim about their pools of bright blue or blue-green. Now, they seemed more hollow and hesitant and afraid and disappointed than she could ever remember seeing them.

She felt her own eyes tear up in response.

“Oh, no. I forgot all about that blowy-up thing that your eyes do. Please, get them under control. All I said was ‘Merry Christmas’.”

She could almost _feel_ him floundering for a sense of control or some footing in this strange situation, and she wanted to help him. She really did want to chuckle or laugh it off and wish him a Merry Christmas in return, but all she could do was cry. It was a confused cry, a cry that didn’t know whether it was happy or sad or just very angry. But it was a full-blown cry, anyway.

She watched him shuffle on his feet while she continued trying to swallow past the ball of emotions sitting in her throat. Eventually, he approached the sofa she was sitting on and sat on its opposite end, not losing their eye contact.

“Please don’t cry, Clara. Please.”

His voice was so soft and careful that it only managed to make her cry more. She gave him her best watery smile.

“You idiot man.” She sniffled. “That’s not how crying works.”

She could have sworn she saw the faintest lifting of his lip.

“Ah. Right.”

He got up, and Clara sat alone on the couch for a few minutes before he made his way back with two cups of tea. He handed her one, and she cursed herself for wanting to cry even more at seeing that it was the mug that she had always used when they drank tea at his place. She kept herself in check and managed to take a sip.

She nearly spit it out.

“Er… I think this is yours. I see you’re still taking your tea disgustingly sweet.”

“Oh, sorry. Yes. That’s just… that’s usually my mug. Well, no. It’s your mug, really. I’ve just been using it for the past while… You know. Retains heat better and all that.”

Everything he did seemed to make her want to cry, and it was starting to make Clara exhausted. But she figured she should have expected something like this.

“I’ve missed you, John.”

At that, he looked up at her with what looked like genuine shock, which Clara found confusing.

“I thought you never wanted to see me again.”

“Christ. I did not miss how obtuse you are. You were my best friend, and you left me crying in the rain.”

“I thought I was just doing what you wanted.” His eyebrows were high on his forehead.

“I lied, John. Of course I wanted to see you again. I _needed_ to see you again.”

“I’m not any good at this stuff, Clara. You know that.”

“I know, you daft old man. I’ve still missed you.”

At this statement, his eyes brightened ever so slightly. “I’ve missed you, too.” Then, he seemed to suddenly remember something. “Wait, what the bloody hell are you doing in Edinburgh, anyway? And how did you end up fainting next to my car?”

“Well, I’m in Edinburgh for a holiday. Wanted to avoid my family and reminders of… Danny for Christmas. Edinburgh seemed like a good enough place. I, er, fainted because I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t even sure if I’d ever see you again. I didn’t expect to get blindsided by the ‘TARDIS’.”

“Ah, well you’re lucky I found you, then.”

“Yes. I really am.”

\---

Clara and John ended up spending Christmas together. He made tea, she made them dinner, and he gave her ice cream that had almost certainly been sitting in his freezer for months. They avoided speaking about certain things, and it bothered her, but she figured they couldn’t just jump right back into their problems after more than a year apart. Plus, it was Christmas. She wanted to enjoy the holiday and her present company.

Overall, it was nice, really nice. He played some Christmas tunes on his guitar while she sang along, slightly off-key. She made him open a Christmas cracker with her and gently placed a green crown on his curly hair.

By the time that things settled and she felt that it was time to go home, though, Clara could see that John wasn’t the same as he was a year ago. He was walled-off from her, seemed scared of her somehow. She sagged at how much they had back-tracked, but she was ultimately extremely glad to have him back in her life.

As he walked her home, their shoulders brushed together in the cold. She wanted to reach out and grab his hand, but she was afraid of being rejected. She missed the awkward contact between them, but she felt that he wasn’t ready for that now.

When they arrived at her door, they stopped and looked hesitantly at each other. They were both very conscious of the fact that she was leaving Edinburgh tomorrow afternoon and that he was in the city on a semi-permanent basis filling in for a professor on sabbatical. They didn’t want to say goodbye.

“Don’t be a stranger, yeah? Come say hi to the little people in Liverpool.”

“Yeah.”

“Take care, too. I _will_ be seeing you again, John Smith. You can count on that.”

“Second chances, eh? Merry Christmas, Clara Oswald.”

He gave her one of his trademark soft smiles that made her chest ache. She reached out and took his hands in hers and briefly squeezed.

“Merry Christmas.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I might not get a chance to update for a while, so I wanted to post this chapter since I already had it written.

Clara returned to Liverpool both happier and sadder than she had left it. It was extremely unsettling. She felt like she was experiencing emotions more than she had been experiencing them for the past year. Maybe, she thought, after the first few months following Danny’s death and her fight with John, she had tuned the whole emotions business out so that she could get on with her life, and seeing John had somehow forced her to experience them all again.

She didn’t know, but she didn’t like it. Or maybe she did? She was undecided.

In any case, she felt extraordinarily lucky to have found John again, against all odds. Her own Christmas miracle, certainly. Every time she pictured the updated version of John in her head, with his new curly hair and stupid trousers, she couldn’t help smiling. But she also felt crushed by the fact that there was no concrete plan for them to see each other again. Sure, she knew where she could look for him now, but she hadn’t even bothered to get his new phone number or a new email address. She had been too overwhelmed to think about those details at the time, but she berated herself for it now.

Nevertheless, she looked forward to the New Year. The last year had frankly been nothing but a fog of depression and isolation that eventually morphed into numbness and complacency. Clara had decided that this upcoming new year would be different. She had reconnected with her lost best friend, and she felt hopeful and driven by the tangible goal of healing her relationship with him. Phone number or no phone number, she had John again and she wouldn’t lose him.

If she had to go back to Edinburgh, she would do so without hesitating. John was worth that and much more.

“Earth to Clara!”

Clara shook her head and turned from her now-cold mug of tea to look up at Amy. The redhead appeared just a tiny bit cross.

“Look, man, if you don’t want to talk you could have just said so.”

“No, yeah, sorry! Still tired from the drive back, that's all. Please, I do want to catch up. How’s your family? How’s Rory?”

“My family’s fine. Rory’s engaged.”

If Clara had been sleepy before, this tore her out of her haze. She nearly fell off of the kitchen stool.

“Did you just say engaged!? Oh my god! Who? When? Are you upset!?”

“God, Clara, I thought you were clever. Of course I’m not upset! I’m thrilled!” Her roommate hit her with a thousand watt smile. She was practically glowing.

Clara couldn’t get past her own confusion. She knew Amy had been hardcore in love with Rory for a long time. How could she be so clearly excited about him being engaged? Was she losing her mind? The only way that Amy could possibly be so happy was if either she somehow secretly hated Rory all along (not likely, in fact practically impossible) or if she was still somehow with him? But that meant...

“OH MY GOD.”

“That took you a good two minutes longer than I expected, honestly. I owe Bill twenty quid. Thanks for nothing, Clara.”

“OH MY GOD.”

“It all happened on Christmas. I wasn’t really expecting it. I wanted to call, but it seemed like something to share with you in person.”

“OH MY _GOD!_ ”

“Are you alright? Should I get someone?” Amy turned towards their hallway. “Bill come in here, Clara’s stuck!”

Bill came in to see Clara sitting with her mouth hanging wide open, repeating ‘oh my god’ over and over.

“Did I win the bet?”

“Yeah, but it’s not fair, I would have won if I had done it over the phone. I know it.”

“Wah, wah. Pay up, Pond!”

Clara watched her roommates continue to talk without really hearing anything. Her mind was still frozen on the idea that Amy had gotten engaged. Yes, she was extremely happy for her. But, some little part of her also flinched at the reminder that she couldn’t have that. Not with the person she had wanted it with, anyway. But no, she wouldn’t think about Danny. One of her best friends was engaged. Appropriate response: fix the broken record situation and hug her as tight as possible.

“Congratulations, Amy!! Gah, we have so much to talk about for your wedding.” Clara threw her arms around her beloved friend squealing as was very appropriate and expected.

“Aaaaand she’s unstuck. Thank you, Clara. I have no idea when we’re going to have it or what it's going to be like, but I’m so excited!”

“You should be!”

Clara and Amy started to squeal together. Bill wasn’t that sort, but she threw them warm smiles and laughed while counting up the money that Amy had given her.

They spent that night drinking wine, listening to Amy retell the story of the proposal, and eventually devolving into drunk singing and dancing in their living room. Their neighbors banged on the shared wall, threatening to report them to the landlord, and they all laughed at getting in trouble.

Yeah. It would definitely be a better new year.

\---

Helping Amy plan her wedding was emotionally draining.

After the high of sharing the happy news that first night, Amy had asked her to become her maid of honor because Bill was not the wedding-planning type. Bill would help with the wild bachelorette party and the search for a great DJ, but the rest of the hard planning was down to Clara, Amy, and Amy’s mum.

At the beginning, Clara thought that the situation genuinely wouldn’t present a problem, and at first, it really didn’t. Eventually, though, as school started back up and time dragged on without any signs of John, the whole planning-of-a-wedding thing became more daunting. They were barely three weeks into the New Year, and Clara was starting to have trouble figuring out whether she was more happy or sad or stressed about the whole mess of it.

She felt like she didn’t even have the time to figure out which part of the experience was causing which emotion. Dress shopping: happy or stressful? Both maybe? Watching Amy be so in love: happy or depressing? Again, maybe both? She couldn’t tell if she was sad solely because of the wedding and the emotions that brought up about Danny or because she realized that finding a way to see John again was only going to become more and more difficult.

It had been an extremely long Saturday. Clara had gone out to at least ten different florists to talk about arrangements and pricing for an average-sized wedding with a blue and white color scheme. It had been fine if a little boring, and throughout the whole day, she kept thinking that John would have been laughing at her ridiculous thoroughness. He would have just chosen the first florist and stuck with it, probably because he would have gotten distracted by all the flowers and plants in the greenhouse, and he would have spent too long in there to ever go visit more than maybe one of the other people on the list. Thoughts like those had become extremely common since Christmas.

Thinking about her second chance with John still made Clara feel like their impossibly coincidental meeting had been a strange and wonderful dream. The only thing that kept her from thinking it was all some weird hallucination was his green Christmas crown. She had taken it and kept it on her night stand.

She was huddled up in her bed, happy to have gotten the florists business taken care of, when her eyes landed once again on that silly but precious crown. She fell asleep running her fingers over the flimsy paper, remembering what it had looked like resting on his head of curls.

\---

Amy had decided on a wedding in very late May, and it was now February. Wedding-wise, the planning was going extremely well and looked to be on-schedule. Reuniting-with-John-wise, planning was going shite.

At least Clara would be getting away this weekend. She and Amy were supposed to be visiting this place near Loch Lomond as a potential venue for her wedding, but Amy had had to stay behind because of some Rory-related emergency. So now it was Clara, on her own, once again driving her way up to Scotland. At least the pictures of the place had seemed beautiful online.

Clara arrived at the estate on Friday evening, honestly shocked by the size of it. She got out of her car and stared up at what seemed to be an old, but massive mansion. It was poorly lit on the outside, though, making it eerie at night.

She walked up to the front entrance and knocked. She waited as she heard someone yelling inside. It sounded like a woman.

“Yes, _hello_ , how could I _ever_ be of assistance?”

Clara frowned at what sounded to her like irritated taunting. She couldn’t clearly see who she was talking to in the relative darkness, so it was hard to say if the question was sincere or indeed mocking, but she still thought it was a bizarre way to greet a potential source of money.

“Er, I’m Clara Oswald. I’m here to visit the estate on behalf of the Pond-Williams wedding party?”

“Ah, yes, of course! The _wedding_. Humans and their need to procreate. What a base instinct, don’t you think?”

The door opened wide and an overhead light came on. A woman in an outdated purple skirt suit was staring at her with the most mischievous look Clara was sure she’d ever seen. She was extremely confused by the woman’s whole attitude.

“Come in, won’t you, dearie?” She laughed and turned to walk back into the house. “Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Unless it’s a full moon, of course.”

Seeing Clara’s look of baffled shock, the woman only laughed more.

“Oh, relax. I’m only pulling your chain, taking the piss, making a joke.”

The woman giggled, twirled around, and skipped down a long hallway before stopping dead in her tracks and turning to throw a frankly scary glare at Clara, who evidently hadn’t followed her.

“Well come _on!_ You’re wasting my time. I don’t like it when people waste my time.”

Clara, seeing few alternative options, followed the lady down the corridor until they came to a stop in front of a door. The older woman just stood there, humming happily and inspecting her nails. Clara was extremely confused about what she was supposed to do, so she loudly cleared her throat. “Now what?”

The woman physically looked like she could throw a temper tantrum. “Do I have to do everything for you? God, _so_ _annoying_.” At Clara’s continued look of bafflement, the woman emphatically rolled her eyes. “This is the bedroom where you’ll be staying. Everything you need should be in there. We’ll start the tour in the morning.” She spoke the last few sentences as if Clara were thick.

In response, she only nodded and turned the door knob. “Great. Thanks.”

“Nighty, night! Watch out for the ghosts!”

Clara wasn’t sure whether she should laugh or seriously nod, so she ended up executing some constipated combination of both.

Once inside the room, though, she quickly went about getting her stuff in order and taking a shower. She was exhausted, that whole meeting desperately needed to be unpacked some other time, and she just needed to sleep.

She set her alarm and prepared to meet with chaos the following day. Oh, the lengths she was willing to go to just for Amy.

\---

When she woke up the next morning, Clara walked out into the hallway and headed back towards the entrance hall. She figured she could probably make her way to any other parts of the estate if she started there.

She sat in the hall for twenty minutes, waiting for her host to meet her at what was supposedly their agreed meeting time, before she got antsy and decided to have a look around. Without any sense of direction, Clara took off down the hallway opposite of her bedroom and ended up wandering into what looked to be a drawing room. The walls were covered in an eclectic mixture of old painted portraits and newer family photographs.

Clara walked slowly down the line, inspecting all the family pictures, until one of them caught her eye. Nearing what seemed to be the most contemporary set of photographs, Clara was stopped by one in particular. It was a picture of a boy with his parents. At first, the picture was much like the rest of them. Just one of the many relatives tied to this old place. But then she caught sight of the eyebrows and eyes on the boy’s face. She would have known that inquisitive frown and intense gaze absolutely anywhere.

The boy in the picture was probably no older than thirteen. He had a head full of crazy brown curls, which he had evidently inherited from his mother. He was smirking at the camera, eyes twinkling in amusement, and his nose was wrinkled in a look of rebellion. He was wearing blue jeans and some space tee shirt, and his arms were hanging down at his sides. He was a skinny boy with pointy elbows and a sharp jaw. It was definitely John Smith.

For a second, she wondered what the hell his picture was doing in this random estate out in the middle of nowhere Scotland. Then, she spotted the last and most recent picture.

In it, John looked to be closer to maybe seventeen years of age. He was sitting on a bench playing a guitar, and to his right, a little girl was sat staring at him. She looked to be about eleven or twelve, and her hair was dark with auburn streaks running through it. Her eyes were the giveaway though. She had incredibly bright blue eyes (apparently beautiful eyes ran in the family), and her gaze seemed mischievous and hyper. Even more so than was typical for a girl her age. Clara had no doubt that it was the woman she had met last night.

She ran her fingers over John’s young, unlined face in the picture. She wondered how these two people were related.

“I was quite adorable when I was young, wasn’t I? Such a shame that the picture’s ruined by the little streak of nothing that’s playing the guitar. He was terrible, if I do say so myself.”

Clara jumped and stepped away from the wall.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to snoop.”

“Yes, you did. Now, tell me. How do you know John?”

“Well, er, he’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh, _is_ he? Oh, that’s hilarious. I’m so sorry for you. How is that little prat doing these days?”

“Er, not totally sure. He was in Edinburgh last time I saw him.”

“Edinburgh! How interesting!”

Everything that the woman said sounded sarcastic to Clara. She couldn’t tell if she really hated John or was playfully joking at it like families sometimes do. She realized she didn’t even know her name.

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“You can call me Missy.”

“Alright, then. Should we get the tour started?”

Despite the fact that Missy’s running commentary was often ludicrous and confusing and sometimes downright terrifying, the tour of the estate was absolutely astonishing. The place was beautiful. It was spacious, it was homey, it had a unique charm, and it had enough rooms to hold the primary wedding guests. The surrounding fields and forests were _so_ different to the usual cityscape that she and her friends lived in that Clara knew everyone would love it. It felt like escaping into a fairytale. Not to mention, the price was reasonable.

Plus, Clara wanted to see if maybe she could find a way to get John out here. She was sure he would be able to show her all the places he used to hide out when he was a kid. She longed to see him in a place that connected him to his youth, to a time before all the loss and the grief.

She wondered why he had never once mentioned it, though. Or why he had never mentioned Missy, who turned out was his cousin. (She had somehow managed to drop that tiny bit of information while telling a story about some made up Nethersphere or something).

He had told her that he had no family anymore, that he had been the last one left of the Smith clan. She wondered what had happened between these two people to cause him to disregard her existence entirely.

\---

Clara was all packed up to leave on Sunday morning when it occurred to her that she had forgotten to ask about the potential of hiring a band to come play at the estate. Before she took her bag out to her car, Clara approached Missy, who appeared to be sharpening a stick for no good reason.

“What’s the estate policy on live music? We’re going to hire a DJ, but we’re also considering getting a live band in for the earlier part of the afternoon. Is that allowed?”

“I don’t really care, but I have to approve of the band. If I’m going to be hearing some coked up wanna-be musicians all the way from my cottage at the skirts of the property, they better not be rubbish.”

“Er. Okay.”

“So? Who’s playing?”

“Well, we're not totally sure yet. The groom is really interested in one band in particular. I think the happy couple were going to go listen to them play tonight at the Cavern Club back in Liverpool.”

“I’ll have to come with you, then!”

“Is that really necessary? I could maybe just have them send you some videos?”

“Don’t be stupid, videos are worthless. I’ll be going back with you to Liverpool today, we can go listen to the band, and then we can make a decision on whether or not they’re allowed to play here.”

Clara sighed. She had absolutely no control over what Missy would or wouldn’t do. She just hoped Missy would travel in her own car.

She didn’t.

Clara road tripped back to Liverpool with an insane lady in her tiny sedan. She considered pulling over and kicking Missy out more than once, but she figured that they had a common goal, and that was just enough to get her through. They made decent enough time, despite having left the estate much later than Clara had planned. Missy had taken her time to pack loads of stuff for no discernible reason.

Once in Liverpool, Clara parked her car back near her flat, and then they caught a cab to the Cavern. She figured Amy and Rory were probably already there, and it wasn’t like they were expecting any company.

As soon as she walked down all the club’s stairs and made it to the part of the Cavern where the band would be playing, Clara stopped in her tracks. She knew they’d made it to the show on time because the guy at the door had told her that the opening act was currently on stage. She _didn’t_ know that the opening act was going to be _John_. Her John.

He was on the claustrophobic stage, playing some riff on his black electric guitar when she walked in and stopped. Her sudden pause caused Missy to bump into her, which in turn, caused her to swear a bit. She suspected Missy would have reacted far more outrageously had she not been totally distracted by John’s presence on stage as well.

Clara, after the initial shock had passed, smiled. She’d heard him play, but she’d never seen him perform before. He was mesmerizing.

He turned and seemed look right at her.

He finished his set playing ‘Pretty Woman’.

Clara was surprised and more than a little bit flattered, but she laughed and enjoyed herself until he finally walked off stage and approached her.

“How did you know I was here? Did you see me?” She couldn’t stop herself from sounding excited.

“When do I not see you?”

Her stomach did a thing. “One face in this dark crowd?”

“There was a crowd, too?”

Clara blushed and was about to respond when he seemed to have spotted Missy standing behind her.

“What the hell are you up to, man?” Missy spoke before he could.

“Well if it isn’t the wicked witch.” John was evidently not happy to see her. “What are you doing here?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, I’m here with my bestest friend Clara to listen to a band that might be coming up to play at the old Smith family estate.”

At the mention of her name, John turned to look at her with a frown. Missy was once again forgotten.

“Clara, how do you know Missy?”

“Amy wants to rent the estate as a venue for her wedding. We actually just met.”

“Ah.” He was still frowning.

“What are you doing playing the Cavern? I thought you were in Edinburgh?”

“Yes. Well, the semester ended, and the professor returned about two weeks ago. I’ve only been here for a week.”

A tiny bit of hope sprung up in Clara’s chest.

“Are you back for good?”

He met her eyes and responded with the smallest hint of a smile. “Yes. I’m back.”

Clara smiled brightly in response, dimples and all.

The moment was subsequently ruined by Missy making fake barfing sounds. “I came here to listen to music, not witness whatever repressed shite this is. Please, keep that for when I’m not around. I could seriously be sick.”

John and Clara both rolled their eyes and chuckled at their simultaneous reactions.

Missy huffed and walked away from them to be closer to the stage as the headline band set up. Neither of them complained. Instead, John and Clara stood near the back for the rest of the night, shoulders brushing, leaning lightly into one another, enjoying the music played by the main act. Clara’s cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

Upon having met her, Clara never thought that she would feel anything approaching gratitude for the insanity that was Missy, but by the end of the night, she was feeling something frighteningly close to it. Without her, she would have missed John performing here.

She turned to look up at him as he bobbed his head to whatever song the band was playing and felt herself laugh. He turned to make gentle eye contact with her when she felt something hesitantly wrap around her little finger.

She looked down to see his long pinky softly hooked around her own and felt a much-missed, familiar warmth diffuse throughout her body.

Maybe Missy wasn’t so bad.

Just then, Clara watched as the woman in her thoughts ruthlessly elbowed a random bloke in the gut just to have more space. She also watched her steal someone else's pint. Or maybe she really _was_ that bad.

But with John back at her side, Clara didn't much care. Yes, most definitely, without a doubt, this would be a better year. With her pinky softly and awkwardly tangled with John's, it was almost impossible to believe otherwise.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, just as things were starting to pick up for the year, I have been sent home. Hope everyone's staying healthy and safe. This stay at home situation has given me more time to write, so here's another chapter way sooner than I had expected it. Which could be a very bad thing, we'll see!

Before their fight had happened and John had gone off on his own, they had made the habit of meeting about once or twice a week for a random adventure. Or a coffee. Usually. John was notoriously inconsistent with his schedule and the way that he did things, but Clara estimated that they had probably averaged just about that.

Since he had moved back to Liverpool, Clara had been making an active effort to see him at least three times a week. So far, she hadn’t been able to discern how he felt about all the time they’d been spending together, and it was starting to get to her. A little over four weeks had passed since the Cavern, and she had no clearer picture now than she did after week one.

Sometimes, she felt that he was just as compelled to see her and spend time with her as she was with him. Other times, Clara would catch him looking at her with a pinched expression on his face. Pain, worry, fear, annoyance? She had no idea what had been going on in his head since they had reunited on Christmas. He had become harder to read, harder to reach.

He almost always seemed like he was struggling with something, but every time that Clara considered bringing it up, she felt a cold sense of fear and dread take over. The thought of him disappearing again, the thought of once again losing someone she cared about made her heart beat faster and her hands shake. She was fairly certain that she wouldn’t be able to cope with that loss. So she stayed silent.

Currently, she and John were in one of the many Beatles museums spread out around the city. When he had invited her to see it with him, he had rapidly listed a number of reasons as to why it would be a great idea, as if he had thought that she might have said no otherwise. All in one breath, John had rattled off that the weather was miserable and he knew how much she cared about her “face paint”, that The Beatles were “pretty great, all things considered”, and that it would be a great excuse to get away from “all the wedding planning nonsense, why is Amy so bananas about all of this, anyway?”.

Clara had laughed and agreed, but she suspected that the museum was his location of choice for other reasons. Number one being that it wouldn’t require them to sit down one on one and talk. Every meeting that had followed their run-in at the Cavern Club had happened in some public place that didn’t really facilitate any range of serious conversations. At first, Clara hadn’t really noticed that John was actively avoiding that kind of situation, but after unsuccessfully suggesting getting coffee or hanging out at his place or getting dinner multiple times, it became abundantly clear that he was no longer comfortable with the possibility of being cornered into talking about something serious.

They both knew there were significant issues they had to address together, but he seemed determined to avoid them.

It made Clara sad and frustrated. Yes, she had missed the fun, rude, adventurous side of her best friend, and she was very glad to have it back; but she had also dearly missed all of his fumbled attempts at tenderness, and now they seemed a million miles away. She didn’t even understand where the very distinct boundary had come from. John had shared quiet moments with her on Christmas. He had even held onto her pinky the whole night that they were at the Cavern! It was all so confusing, and she just wanted to understand. But to understand why he wanted to avoid talking to her in the first place, she had to talk to him.

It was an impossible situation that she tried not to think about when she was with him. It would ruin the fun and spoil the joy that she felt at having him back in her life.

Right in that moment, she was watching John run around the Sgt. Pepper album cover exhibit, despite the many, _many_ signs posted emphatically telling visitors that touching those props was strictly against museum policy. Somehow, when her back was turned, he had wandered into a locked closet and found an extra costume that matched those on the famous album cover photograph. She wondered why it seemed that no one but her ever noticed him breaking the rules.

“Clara, quick, take a picture of me!”

“What? No! I don’t think you want evidence of the fact that you violated the rules in here. Plus, you look ridiculous. Lime green and a fake mustache are _really_ not a good look for you.”

He mumbled his response, but she was fairly certain she heard him say: “Well those pointy stilts you insist on wearing don’t make any sense, but _I’m_ not allowed to say anything about it…” She missed everything that came after that, but she suspected he was only grumbling about her perceived rudeness. His eyebrows were doing that very cross thing that they often did.

“Fine, fine. Pose! You only get one go at this.” She huffed and pretended to be put out by his request. In reality, she’d probably snap closer to ten pictures, most of them capturing him fumbling and tripping along the props and trying to figure out how he wanted to look.

In the end, he chose to stand with his legs slightly spread apart and his hands held together in front of him. He added his usual sunglasses and raised his left eyebrow. Clara would never tell him, but the look wasn’t half bad. Aside from the ridiculous fake mustache, of course.

“You know, I think I could go undercover.”

“Undercover? Have you _seen_ you?”

“Oi! I’m a man of mystery. Just look at how well I pull off this lime green.” He pulled at the lapels of his green captain’s jacket and gave her a wicked smile.

She laughed at his theatrics and lightly shoved him. “Just go put it back before someone finally sees you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She watched him run off to who-knows-where and continued on following the Beatles’ story. As she wandered into the next part of the museum, she realized that she was in The Beatles White Album room. All around her were images of these musical legends from a time gone by, a series of portraits of a talented man who died too soon, videos of young fans that flocked to see them from all around the world, and bits and pieces of lyrics turned into works of art.

She loved the White Album. She remembered her mum listening to it when she was a kid. She remembered walking down the stairs on Saturday mornings, the smell of breakfast wafting from their small kitchen, and hearing her mom singing _Dear Prudence_ and _Honey Pie_.

Over a small speaker that was set up in the corner of the room, _Dear Prudence_ began to play—because life did those kinds of things sometimes—and Clara closed her eyes. It was so strange to be reminded of that time in her life now. She felt tears starting to well up beneath her lashes, but they weren’t sad. It just felt refreshingly good to remember her mum.

“Sorry that took so long, these pudding brains in security said I was going to be kicked out, so I had to run off. They’ll find me again soon. Clara? Clara, have you fallen asleep standing up?”

Clara opened her eyes to find John standing in front of her with his eyebrows furrowed in confusion, and then concern. She sensed that he didn’t quite understand why she was crying. She didn’t respond.

“Er. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She gestured in the general direction of the speaker and smiled a little sadly. “Just reminds me of my mum.”

He looked slightly panicked at the mention of her mum, like he didn’t quite know what words to use to console her or to express himself. Surprisingly though, instead of avoiding the issue with a rapid change in topic or a distraction like he usually did, John reached out to take her hand. It was the first time since the Cavern that he had initiated contact. He laced his long, cool fingers through hers and very gently ran his thumb along the back of her hand. He stared down at their tangled fingers.

“Good song.” He took a hesitant step forward and looked up from their hands to gaze into her teary eyes.

Clara felt her breath catch. “John–”

Their moment was rudely interrupted by a young man in a security uniform. “You! If you try to run again, I’ll just call the police. Come on, mate. You don’t want your little friend here to get in trouble, yeah? Just leave.”

After what she could have sworn was a small squeeze, John let his fingers slip out through hers and dropped his hand back down to his side. He didn’t say anything to her as he turned around and approached the security guard with his hands up.

“Alright. We’re leaving.”

And just like that, they left and spent the rest of the afternoon debating over the best Beatles songs, completely glossing over their little moment in the White Album room.

Nevertheless, things had begun to shift between them. Clara could feel it.

—

Things after the museum incident were better between Clara and John. He seemed less distraught about whatever had been bothering him before and more willing to spend time with her one on one. On her end, she felt her fear of pushing him to disappear again begin to subside and was therefore less afraid of talking and asking and occasionally even touching. They were probably closer now than they had ever been before.

It was late-April now, and aside from John, things with Amy’s wedding began to truly heat up. All the planning and coordinating were at long last coming to their final stages. The only things left to review were the number of guests planning to attend and the final arrangements for what would truly be an epic bachelorette party, for which Clara was extremely excited.

Regardless, Clara had been so busy with work and John and making sure that everything with the wedding was going smoothly that she had forgotten to RSVP to the wedding’s festivities. Amy’s mum (the person in charge of doing the head count) had probably already included her in her arrangements, but Clara wanted to bring a plus one. Which, when she thought about it, would probably come as a huge shock to just about everyone.

All her friends and family knew that she had been single since Danny, and really, she still _was_ single. But now she had John, and she wanted to finally introduce him to everyone. Of course, Clara knew that it would be insanely difficult to reasonably explain her relationship to the man, but she felt that it was worth it. No, she wasn’t particularly looking forward to navigating the minefields of how they had met, or how she had come to be friends with a man so much older than herself, or why she had kept him a secret for so long, but it felt like introducing John to her friends and family would make him more _anchored_ in her life. She felt that they both needed that.

Plus, she thought that maybe, _just maybe_ , introducing him to her friends and family would give him more ties to the world that he so often neglected.

The biggest problem with her plan, however, wasn’t the complicated explaining, or their age difference, or any of that. It was that Clara had yet to invite John as her plus one. In order to introduce him, he had to be present, and in order for him to be present, he had to be invited. She honestly had no idea how to do it though, and every time she thought she would, she chickened out.

Suspecting that she would very likely be a coward about it, Clara had chosen to set a date by which she absolutely, no exceptions, had to ask him. Unfortunately for her, that date was today, and she was panicking as she sat in John’s workshop. He had noticed her apprehension since she had arrived at his place but had evidently chosen not to press her on the matter.

She was watching John take apart an old FM radio when she decided that she had to just go for it.

“So, you know Amy’s wedding is coming up pretty soon. Less than a month away, actually.”

“Yes. I’m sure you’re all very excited for the dresses and the face paint and the dancing. Blegh, the bloody dancing.” She watched on in curiosity as he took the front face of the radio off and started to fiddle with the wires tangled up inside.

“You don’t like dancing?”

“Categorically not. I look like a waddling penguin.”

She laughed as she imagined him awkwardly bobbing from side to side in a tuxedo. “If you hate it so much, how did you get by at your wedding?”

At hearing her question, John’s right hand slipped, and he sliced his left palm open with a flat-head screwdriver. Dropping the tool, he yanked his hand away and hissed.

“Bullocks.”

“Shit! Are you alright? God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to–”

“It’s fine, Clara. I just need to clean it out.”

Before he could walk out of the room, Clara grabbed his forearm and stopped him. “Let me help you. Where do you keep your first aid?”

He considered letting her help for a moment before finally nodding. “It’s in the bathroom, under the sink.”

“Okay, I’ll fetch it. You run that under some water.”

She ran off to get the kit and berated herself for being such an arse. She let herself get comfortable with how close they had become and then went ahead and said something thoughtless. In all the time she had known him, he had rarely ever talked about his wife—Clara truly didn’t know what had compelled her to say what she did. She felt like such an idiot for screwing up the dynamic they had going, but right then was not the time to focus on it.

By the time that she ran into the kitchen, fully prepared to help clean his cut, John was already at the sink, rinsing out his left hand. Clara paused. For the first time in their whole acquaintance, John had rolled up his sleeves. She was absolutely certain that she had _never_ seen him in anything but long sleeves, whether it be in the form of button up shirts, jumpers, hoodies, or his favorite coat. It was positively jarring to see his arms all the way up to his elbows.

Her brain had short-circuited, and she wanted to stare (boy, she _really_ wanted to stare), but she had come into the kitchen with an express purpose, and now she had to follow through. With a deep breath, she walked up behind him and hopped up onto his kitchen counter.

“Alright, then. Give me your hand.”

John turned away from the kitchen sink and placed his left hand gently into her own, watching as Clara started to go about carefully drying it. He stoically stood in front of her legs as they dangled from his counter, and she worked on drying the skin around the cut in silence.

“River was a great dancer.”

At his sudden admission, Clara had to physically force herself to _not_ whip her head up and stare at him. She desperately wanted to keep it casual so that he wouldn’t feel afraid or pressured to speak. This was an important moment.

She hummed quietly, but she said nothing. She didn’t know what to say. Instead, she rummaged around the kit to retrieve the iodine.

“I didn’t want to dance at my wedding. In fact, I had repeatedly made that point excessively clear. After some teasing, she’d made it seem like she was alright with that, and she probably was. Then our big night came, and I was buzzed. Too much cheap champagne, too much of _her_ …”

Clara continued to gently clean his cut out with iodine, trying not to lose her focus while doing her best to absorb all of this precious, new information.

“Anyway, one of her favorite songs came on. It was a song I had used to play for her on my guitar when we had first started dating. It came on, and she just looked at me. She just looked at me, and I was twenty-nine and so in love and I just knew right then that I was going to dance with her to that stupid song because I didn’t care that I looked like an idiot so long as I got to share it all with her. In the end, I actually quite enjoyed it. I think she knew that I would. Things with her were always like that. She always challenged me. Helped me grow…”

Clara suddenly realized that she had stopped cleaning out the cut, too focused on the words he was saying and the picture he was painting. She had been letting his hand just rest in hers. Slowly, because she didn’t want to lose their point of contact or startle him, she reached back into the kit to find a plaster that would hold well on his palm. Grabbing one that she figured would suit, she slowly and carefully placed it over the cut. She gently rubbed the edges of the plaster into his skin, making sure that it would stick as he moved and flexed his hand.

When she was done, she cupped his left hand between both of hers and finally looked up at him.

His gaze was unfathomable. It was soft and it was passionate and it was a tiny bit melancholic. She was once again reminded of his sheer capacity for _feeling_. She felt like she had gotten a glimpse into a world that very very few people had ever gotten the chance to see, and she let the knowledge that he trusted her with stories of his past life wash over her. He trusted her to help him dress a cut. He trusted her, full stop.

She looked back down at their hands. “Thank you, John.”

“For what?”

“For trusting me.”

John raised his right hand, which had been resting at his side, and placed it lightly on top of her own. “You don’t need to thank me for that.”

A silent moment passed.

Not ready to look back up at him, Clara let her eyes run over the blindingly pale skin of his forearms—tracing the patterns of his veins, following the lines of his wiry muscles and his skinny wrists, looking for his sparse arm air, finding odd freckles here and there. As she took in all of these new details, she realized how unfamiliar these parts of his body and his life story were to her. How vulnerable and human he suddenly seemed.

She felt the guilt that she had been harboring since that terrible day in the rain come down on her all at once. How could he let her be here with him? How could he share his stories with her? How could he forgive her after what she had done?

“Why would you trust me?” Her voice came out quiet and strained.

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?” His was confused.

Her head whipped up and her voice came out desperately. “Because of everything I’ve done, John! Because even when I knew what it might do to you, I made you leave. Because even when I knew what it meant to you, I tried to destroy one of the last things that still tied you to River. Because I left you alone. I left you alone, to hurt by yourself, and I didn’t even care.”

They held eye contact. He was silent for a minute.

“You betrayed me. You betrayed my trust and you betrayed our friendship. You let me down.”

Hearing the words tore at Clara’s heart like very few things in her life had ever managed to do before. She felt hot shame burn through her.

“But do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?”

Her whole world practically stopped. She looked into his eyes and saw compassionate understanding. _True_ understanding. For the first time in a year and a half, Clara felt light. Like the tons of guilt that she had been carrying around were finally sliding off her shoulders. She didn’t deserve a friend like John, but she had him. And she was determined to never hurt him like that again.

“I won’t let it happen again. I promise.”

His eyes, if possible, got even softer, and he gave her the slightest nod. They maintained silent eye contact while still grasping each other’s hands before John snapped out of it.

“Well, so much for making a clockwork squirrel.”

Clara chuckled. “ _That’s_ what you were going to do with the radio?”

“Yes! What else could you possibly want a radio for? All they do is get stupid, little tunes stuck in your head. A clockwork squirrel is much better.”

“What were you even going to do with it once it was finished?”

Suddenly, he looked sheepish. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you could take it.”

“Me?”

He quickly recovered from his momentary bashfulness. “Of course, you! I’ve seen your attempts at interior decorating. Nothing circular or interesting or clockwork at all. It’s an embarrassment.”

“Speaking of my interior decorating—which is beautiful, thank you very much—you haven’t come around recently. You should come over sometime.”

“To your flat? Don’t you have roommates that you want to keep as far away from me as possible?” She could tell he was trying to joke about the fact that he had become too afraid to go to her apartment since their conversation about boundaries, which seemed like ages ago now.

“Yes. And yes. Well, no. Yes, to my flat. Yes, I have roommates, but no I don’t want to keep you away from them. Actually, there was something I was meaning to ask you…”

Clara fell silent and began to fidget with his fingers. She was hesitating because she didn’t quite know how to transition into inviting him to a wedding after their already wild turns in conversation. This whole afternoon had already been a roller coaster. She wasn't eager to pile on.

He seemed to sense her hesitation, and his fingers tensed in her hands. “Listen, if you want your key back, it’s not a big deal. I can return it.”

This got her attention. “No, no! That’s not it at all! I was just wondering if maybe… well, if you’re available the weekend of May 23rd, I thought, if you wanted to, that maybe you could… bemyplusonetoAmy’swedding?”

“I’m sorry, did you just ask me to come with you to your best friend’s wedding?”

“Er, yes. But only if you want to! I’d totally get it if you didn’t, I know we just talked about… Er, you know. Well, anyway I just thought it could be fun. Maybe you could finally meet my parents and my flatmates. Plus, it’s happening at your old family’s estate, that could be—“

“Yes, I’ll come with you. Just please stop the word vomit, it's giving me motion sickness.”

“Oh, you will? Oh, that’s great! Yeah, that’s great. We can get the details all sorted out later.”

“Clara, please stop crushing my hands, you’ll undo all of your hard work.”

She yelped and let go of his palms. She didn’t know why she was suddenly being so awkward, but she was incredibly happy. She smiled up at him, full blast. Dimples, slight crinkle around her eyes, face flushed with mirth, all of it.

He returned it with his own smile, achingly soft. It made her chest hurt.

She grabbed his hands again and looked down as she tenderly ran her fingertips along the papery soft skin of his exposed forearms. He really was a skinny bastard, but she enjoyed the sensation of his muscles twitching beneath his taught, milk-white skin.

This was a touch they’d never shared before.

She felt something building in intensity, perhaps sensed it in the electricity running up through his ropey muscles, perhaps sensed it in the way that his breathing changed ever so slightly. She didn’t know what it was, but she was afraid to look up.

She heard herself speak before she had even made the conscious decision to open her mouth. “Maybe we can get you some sun, too. Scottish Dracula.”

Well. She had always known she was a bit of a coward when it came to John.

He laughed at her comment and pushed away from her before gathering up the first aid kit and taking it back to his bathroom. Clara noticed that when he came out, he had his sleeves rolled back down.

Neither of them made a big deal out of it, and they spent the rest of the night trying to upgrade John’s favorite telescope. He said he wanted to have it ready by the end of May so that they could take it to Scotland with them, which made Clara smile. John had agreed to be her plus one, and apparently he had plans to go stargazing.

She’d worry about everything that his introduction might entail some other time. For now, she just reveled in her excitement and made sure John didn’t hurt himself anymore than he already had.


	6. Chapter 6

Shots. Too many shots.

The world around her was starting to become just the slightest bit fuzzy around the edges. Her mouth was hot with the foul taste of cheap vodka, and her head felt heavier than it usually did. She decided she needed a seat.

She spotted a questionable booth in a dark corner of the room and ungracefully flopped down into it. Bill really had gone all out to make this a proper party, and this was only the _second_ stop.

It had all started out innocently enough. Clara and her flatmates had been the first people to gather for the bachelorette party, which had started at their flat. In the spirit of being the original three musketeers, they had taken two rounds of shots together, cringing at the foul taste of the cheapest stuff you could buy. The shots had gone straight to Clara's head because she hadn't eaten as she hustled about getting ready for the evening, but she had figured it would eventually level out as she planned to slow her drinking down for the night.

The drinking hadn't yet managed to slow down.

Soon after the flatmate trio had taken their shots, all the other women who had been invited (Amy's cousins, Rory's sisters, and Amy's friends) had started to arrive. Things had really taken off from there.

There had been many rounds of shots to be had, and Clara was competitive. Yes, she was small and English, but she had somehow convinced herself that she could reasonably keep up with the drinking of Amy's tall, Scottish cousins. She had been quite wrong.

So now, here she was, not even two hours into what was supposed to be a long night, sitting on a sticky couch in one of the city's most popular nightspots, trying to get the world to go back into focus.

Her vodka-addled mind considered the possibility of texting John, but the tiny part of herself that was still sober stopped her from doing it. He would probably get confused and concerned, and she didn't need that right now.

What she needed was a man she could take to bed.

Her new-and-improved friendship with John had been acting like a balm to her aching soul, helping her heal and move on from Danny's passing, and she was now finally feeling like she wanted to date again. Or at least get laid. God, she _really_ wanted to get laid. A few weeks ago, Clara had realized that in just a few short months, it would be almost two full years since she had last had sex.

For a thirty-year-old in her position, that frankly seemed unconscionable. She had hoped that a good bachelorette party would help her remedy the situation.

With that hope in mind, she had gone all out when getting ready for the night. She had shaved all over (which had honestly taken up _way_ too much of her time to _not_ result in some perhaps-regrettable sex), and she had chosen a hot outfit. Tight black trousers, strappy black heels, a red sleeveless blouse that accentuated her breasts, and her signature leather jacket. She had arrived at their second stop feeling like she was ready to conquer the world of men. Now, she wasn't so sure.

As she watched Amy dancing with their friends from where she was sitting, her vision was cut off by a man who had come to stand right in front of her.

"Mind if I join you?"

Clara shamelessly looked him over. He was about average height, and he had brown hair, brown eyes, and a scruffy beard. His black v-neck and tight trousers highlighted that he wasn't exactly lean but that he was strong and muscular. His smile was pleasant enough.

"Sure, why not?"

The guy sat down across from her in the booth, and she mentally gave him a few points for that. She would have freaked out if he had boxed her in by sitting next to her.

"What's your name?" He lacked the northern accent that most of the people in Liverpool had, but she liked the way his mouth moved.

"Clara. What's yours?"

"I'm Tom." He paused. "So, what are you doing here by yourself? Boyfriend ditch you?"

"Real smooth, guy.” She rolled her eyes a bit. “No, my boyfriend didn't ditch me. I'm here with my friends for a bachelorette party. Just needed a breather."

"Well in that case, would you let me buy you a drink?"

"Hell no. No more alcohol. Plus, I don't know you."

He chuckled at her response. "Quite right. Well then, Clara, ask me some questions. We can take turns."

For a while, Clara and Tom went back and forth asking and answering each other's easy questions. As they spoke, she felt her degree of inebriation making its way back down to normal levels, and she decided that Tom would be a great way to rediscover the world of casual sex.

He was in the middle of telling her where he went to school when her phone’s screen lit up with a notification. She noticed his eyes briefly linger on her screen.

"Are you a big Beatles fan, then?"

Clara was taken off-guard by the question. It was so different from the things they had been talking about before.

"Er, I like them well enough, but I'm not that big of a fan, really. Why do you ask?"

"Your phone's screensaver. The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, right? Seems like you're a big fan to me."

"Oh, right. That." She paused, some part of her considering whether or not she should talk about it to the guy she wanted to take home, but she was still uninhibited enough to let her mouth run free. "Well, it's not really the actual album cover. It's a picture I took. You see the beanpole with the crazy hair and stupid smirk, wearing the neon green jacket and sunglasses off to the right?” She pointed at her phone’s screen. “He's not part of the real album cover. That's my friend John. I took the picture when we went to the Beatles Story museum. We got kicked out for it, actually." She laughed openly at the memory.

Tom's open and friendly expression had suddenly shifted into something more confused. "Isn't that a bit weird?"

"What's a bit weird?"

"Having a picture of your so-called _friend_ as your screensaver?"

"No. Why would it be? This picture's hilarious! He didn't even know I was taking this one, that's why he's halfway through changing his pose. He looks like an idiot." She grinned and looked up to find that Tom’s countenance was serious.

"Have you ever slept with him?"

"What? No! That's just John, he's just my friend. Plus, it’s really none of your business. Don't presume to know anything about me just because we've been chatting for less than an hour." She knew her defensive reaction probably wasn't helping her case, but she felt her anger flare at the thought that this random guy could judge her friendship with John.

"Look, sorry. I didn't mean to step on any toes. Just." He looked apologetic for a second before he went back to looking slightly annoyed. "Look, I have close female friends, right? But none of them have ever ended up as my phone's lock screen. I like them immensely, don’t get me wrong, but they're not what I want to see every time I check the time or get a text or whatever."

Clara wasn't quite sure what to say, so she just stared at him in silence.

"Listen, I've had a good time talking to you. Genuinely. I think you're funny, and honestly, I find you incredibly hot. But I'm not looking to get tangled up in anything complicated, and whatever your whole situation with your friend is, it seems pretty complicated to me." Tom slid to the end of the booth and began to stand up.

"Wait! Don't go. I swear I'm not looking for anything complicated either."

"Clara, I'd love to stay. But trust me. If you went home with me tonight, you'd regret it."

"How could you _possibly_ know that?"

"Because I've been in love before. I know what it looks like."

Clara, feeling like she’d just been punched in the gut, was about to go on the defensive again, but he cut her off.

"And yeah, yeah, before you deny it all in an angry speech, I'll grant you that maybe I really am wrong because I don't know anything about you or your friend. But I think you need the chance to think about it."

He seemed to be waiting for her to respond, but quickly realizing that she wouldn't, he spoke again. "Look, if it turns out I'm wrong, I'd love to try this again. You can call me."

With that, he was off to put another order in at the bar with his friends.

Clara sat in drunk, stunned silence. Tom was wrong. He couldn't be right. Setting someone's picture as your wallpaper was not an indication of love. That would be the _stupidest_ thing ever. Love was not that shallow or that simple. Plus, at one point, Clara's wallpaper had been a picture of her with Amy and Bill. It wasn't like she was in love with _them_. Therefore, Tom was wrong. So, so wrong.

Clara checked her phone and saw that the notification responsible for ending her chances with Tom was a text from Bill. The party was going to be leaving this place soon to move onto their next location.

Clara sighed, resigned to follow the party around for the rest of the evening, even if she wasn't in the mood anymore. She shot off her quick reply, confirming that she'd be tagging along, and sat staring at her phone's lock screen.

Despite her recent disappointment, it never failed to make her smile.

John just looked so ridiculous in this picture. How could anyone see this and get mad? Here was this gangly man who had blithely broken the rules in one of Liverpool's most famous museums just to get his picture taken with the best Sgt. Pepper's album cover set in existence. It was absurd. _He_ was absurd. With his black tartan trousers and his stupid boots and his awkward limbs and... _Oh_.

Well.

Clara still didn't agree with Tom, but maybe there was some _tiny_ glimmer of truth to his words. If asked, she would still insist that she was not in love with him, but _maybe_ she harbored more than just strictly friendly feelings towards John.

She stopped herself there. She absolutely did not want to be thinking about this while drunk, horny, and now very confused.

She stood from the booth, having regained her bearings, and joined her friends on the dance floor for one last song before they moved on.

\---

The final stop for the bachelorette party tour was low-key. They had made six stops total, including this last pub, and things were starting to wind down. This final location was relatively small, and it had the charm of a small-town pub. The walls were covered in pictures of long-dead relatives and metal signs for different brands of lagers and stouts, and there were regulars chatting up the people behind the bar. A smell of chips and vinegar and beer wafted through the air, and somewhere in the corner, someone was messing about with an old jukebox.

The original three musketeers were happily jammed into what could have been Britain's smallest corner booth. They were each nursing a beer while enthusiastically eating the chips that sat between them, enjoying the cool sensation of their drinks, the salty taste of their food, and the familiarity of each other's company.

Eventually, once the chips had disappeared, Amy spoke. "Guys, I'm getting married. I'm getting married in a _week_."

"Oh shit, you're moving out soon." Bill sounded like she'd completely forgotten about that aspect of Amy's new situation.

"Aye, but I'll force you guys to hang out with me like I always do."

Clara spoke up. "It's going to be so weird not getting ready to go to work with you. Or not being able to just walk into your room to ask if you want to get pissed and eat take away."

The three of them somberly nodded.

Amy spoke again. "This was always going to happen eventually though, right? You guys taught me so much about how to function like a working adult, and now I guess it's just time for me to put it all to the test."

Bill enthusiastically raised her pint. "To putting it all to the test."

The three of them clinked glasses and took large gulps of their beer.

Clara took the opportunity to finally ask the question that she'd been wanting to ask since she had found out that Amy was engaged. "What's it like? You know, the whole love and marriage thing? How did you know it would be Rory?"

Amy shrugged a little and smiled. "I didn't really know it would be him. I've known Rory since we were wee, and there wasn't one moment where all of a sudden I thought I would spend the rest of my life with him. It wasn't love at first sight, and it wasn't love that hit me all at once, either. I mean you guys have met Rory. He can be such an idiot, but he's a lovely idiot."

Amy sat there for a moment, seemingly trying to think of how best to express what she felt about her fiancé.

"The best I can say is that our love is one that's been built from a whole lifetime spent sharing ourselves with each other. If that makes any sense. We saw each other grow up, and we've been there for everything, and we know each other better than we know most people. I can count on Rory for absolutely anything—he's the most dependable and selfless guy that I know. He's beautiful because of what he is to me."

Amy seemed to be lit up from the inside. She absently played with her engagement ring.

Bill spoke first. "Wow. Someday, I hope I find a girl that makes me talk like that."

Clara felt her heart beating out of control, but she tried to speak calmly. "I'm so happy for you, Amy. I'm so glad you found your person."

Her voice came out level and sincere, but she was freaking out on the inside. Of course she didn't have someone like Rory in her life—she didn't keep in touch with anyone from her childhood, let alone share a deep and abiding relationship with one of them. But the way that Amy spoke about Rory felt eerily similar to the way that she felt and thought about John.

Oh, God.

Did she totally misunderstand what it meant to love? She knew that she felt a deep, persisting loyalty to John—an instinctive drive to keep him company and see him smile and watch him run around while he was somehow both very rude and incredibly kind to other people. But was that _love_?

Amy seemed to think so. For goodness’s sake, she was about to get married and build a new life based on that specific understanding of the concept of love. She couldn't possibly have it all wrong.

But that didn't necessarily mean that she had it all right, either.

Clara knew that love was experienced differently by different people, and that love didn't look the same in different relationships. But how different could it be before it changed into something else? The love that Clara had felt for Danny had been innocent and awkward and sweet and full of light and laughter. It was love, and a love that ended up breaking her, but it was _nothing_ like the sensation that tied her to John.

The thing that tied her to John, whatever it was, felt like it was written into the fibers of her soul. Somehow, it felt like it was inevitable that she should be tied to him, that they should always find a way back to each other. As if the thing that tied them together was so strong that it would move and wrinkle and tear at the very fabric of the world around them to let them be with each other.

Their connection was largely based on a mutual sense of duty to one another, which had originally stemmed from a shared understanding and experience of loss. She knew that. But their whole friendship was also hugely based in coincidence, which was much harder to grasp. The coincidences that had constantly brought them together over the years seemed so much bigger than her and John—their constant run-ins, the way that they had met, their reunion in Edinburgh, followed by their reunion in Liverpool. It all seemed, for lack of a better word, destined.

Whatever it was that she felt for John, Clara felt that it had, to some degree, been out of her control.

Was _that_ love? Feeling like time and space would twist and bend in order to make sure that the two of them stayed together? Like their feelings were just so powerful and deep and fixed that they would manipulate the fabric of the universe without them even knowing?

Better question: was she absolutely losing it?

Well, she wasn't exactly sober. She wasn't really drunk anymore, but she was still riding a buzz from the heavy drinking she had done earlier in the night. Plus, she was still nursing her beer.

She decided to table her thinking for another night. Now was Amy's last weekend as a single woman, and she was choosing to spend it with her and Bill.

The flatmate trio passed the weekend laughing and crying and reminiscing.

\---

Clara hadn't gone back to thinking about the possibility of being in love with John after the bachelorette party was over. She had very comfortably written it all off as drunken nonsense (though she selectively chose to forget that she hadn't really been all that drunk at the end).

It was a necessary course of action. She couldn't possibly go to a wedding with John as her plus-one and introduce him to her friends and family while thinking about whether or not she was in love with him. The wedding weekend would be complicated and stressful enough without the addition of extra feelings and entanglements.

The wedding festivities would be starting this afternoon. Clara had taken a half-day at work, and was now sitting outside of her flat with her suitcase, waiting for John to pick her up in the 'TARDIS'.

She was nervous about getting in his car. She hadn't been in it in years. Not that she would ever admit it out loud, but she had been avoiding his car since they'd reunited. And now, with her shitty sedan in the shop for repairs and the estate being in the middle of nowhere, his notorious 'TARDIS' was their only real option for going to Scotland.

Clara was more excited than nervous, though. John had told her to pack for an extra day at the estate, as he had apparently coerced his cousin to let them stay an extra night and wanted to show her around when no one else would get in their way. Hopefully. At least that was the idea. Clara didn't have high hopes with Missy being around.

Plus, she was excited because the wedding party would be full of people whom she considered her friends, and it would be fun to spend a weekend away with them.

After only ten minutes of sitting outside, Clara saw a blue car rolling down her street. She stood up and approached while John got out of the driver's seat to get her bag.

"Have you shrunk?" John was looking down at her with confusion etched into his features. Clara stopped being surprised by his inability to say hello like a normal person very quickly after their initial acquaintance.

Her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion until she looked down at her feet. "No, you idiot. I'm just wearing trainers instead of my usual heels."

"You're puny." He smiled as he said it, like he thought it was hilarious that she was only five foot one.

"And you're rude. This isn't even the first time you've seen me without heels on!"

"No. No, I don't think so."

She playfully rolled her eyes before she ended up laughing. "Shut up. Get in the car. We're going to be late."

Once they were both situated in the ‘TARDIS’, he shifted into first gear and pulled away from the curb.

"So, since I'm the pilot here, I feel I should set the ground rules for this five hour car ride."

Clara nervously laughed but nodded in acknowledgement. She was afraid that it would have something to do with her destruction of his property.

"First and foremost, you will limit your bathroom necessities. If we leave now and stop briefly once, we should make it there by six o'clock at the latest."

"I can't 'limit' my bathroom necessities! That's not how bladders work."

"Well, you should have thought of that before you got into the 'TARDIS'. Secondly, I get final, nonnegotiable ruling on any and all music choices. If you want to travel with me again, you will abide by this rule."

She chuckled. "Alright, Doctor Disco."

At her use of his forbidden nickname, he shot her a cross look but continued without acknowledging it.

"Thirdly, you will not touch the console of the car. As I’m sure you remember, she is sensitive and very finicky. She responds only to my special touch."

He looked so smug that Clara couldn't help but laugh. "Yeah, yeah. Just drive. I'll follow your stupid rules."

"If this is what I can expect for the rest of the weekend, I might ditch you at the side of the road," he grumbled.

"No you wouldn't. You would never show up to a wedding by yourself."

"Who says I wouldn't just go out there to see my cousin and use my upgraded telescope?"

"You hate Missy. And you only like your upgraded gadgets when you can show them off to someone else."

He huffed, pretending to be put out, but didn't reply.

Clara breathed a sigh of relief. No talk of 'TARDIS' destruction. She suspected that John made a big show of it all to make her more comfortable in his car right at the very beginning of their trip. Gratitude silently welled within her.

Without hesitating, she took John's aux cord and plugged in her phone. She let all of her songs play on shuffle while she watched the city melt away and turn into rolling, green hills.

Of course, John abused his power with skipping songs, and occasionally they argued over the merits of listening to "worthless pop", but overall the trip was pretty pleasant. Even with the extra stop that John had had to make because Clara had bought and crushed a liter of water at their first and only scheduled pit stop.

By the time John pulled into the estate, the sun was beginning to set. They'd made it right on time.

The wedding’s first event was a relatively casual dinner meant to help the wedding attendees meet each other and mingle. There was no need to go all out in terms of dress, but Clara felt like she couldn’t show up to the dinner looking like she just rolled out of a five hour car ride. She’d take advantage of the extra hour they had before the dinner to get herself situated and take a hot shower.

After unloading their bags from the car, Clara and John wandered into the estate side by side. There were already loads of people milling about, all doing some mixture of getting ready, introducing themselves to each other, and chatting. It was a lively, happy atmosphere.

Amy’s mum approached the both of them as they stood in the entrance hall to usher them to their respective rooms. Clara’s room was right next to Bill’s and close to the rest of Amy’s closest family and friends, but because she had been so late to notify Amy’s mum about her plus one, John’s room ended up on the opposite side of the estate. Not that it really mattered much.

Before they split, Clara bumped him with her shoulder. “Come knock on my door in like forty-five minutes, yeah? We can go to the dinner together. Plus, I think I’d get lost if I went looking for you.”

John nodded and took off.

As promised, after exactly forty-five minutes (because sometimes he could actually be punctual), Clara heard a knock on her door.

She opened it to find that John had changed out of his tartan trousers into a more professional pair of black slacks and that his soft t-shirt had been changed out for a crisp button down. He looked freshly shaved, and his hair was residually damp, though somehow still an untamed mess of curls.

Overall, Clara thought that John cleaned up for the dinner remarkably well. She ineffectually tried to hold back her blush, and spoke up in an effort to distract him.

“Ready to meet Amy and Bill?”

“No.”

“Be glad my dad and his wife won’t be around until tomorrow. Fair warning: Linda’s almost certainly going to say something terrible.”

John’s eyebrows pushed together in concern and distaste. “This is going to be dreadful.”

“No, it won’t! We’re at some fantastical old estate, we’re going to watch two beautiful people get married, we’re in Scotland, and we get a ton of free food. Plus, we’ll get to stargaze.”

She saw him perk up at the mention of Scotland, food, and stars. She hated that she found it so endearing. He was such a child sometimes.

“C’mon, Doctor Disco. Let the weekend fun begin.”

This time, he couldn’t restrain himself from ranting and raving about all the reasons as to why his nickname was not as ridiculous as it sounded, and she laughed heartily during their whole walk to the dinner venue.

In the back of her mind, Clara noted that the pure happiness that bubbled through her as she laughed with John, leaning on his side when she couldn’t catch her breath, felt like the sort of thing that someone, somewhere might call love.


	7. Chapter 7

“So, let me get this straight. You two ran into each all over Liverpool, Clara introduced herself, you two became best buddies for a few years, you had some sort of nasty friend break-up, and then you found each other again in Edinburgh?” Amy flicked her quizzical gaze back and forth between Clara and John. “Oh, and he’s a good twenty six years older than you, and he drives a car called the ‘Tardis’ or something. Am I missing anything?”

Bill nodded along.

After the actual dinner part of the night had come to an end, Clara had finally gotten a chance to catch both Amy and Bill in a free moment to introduce John. Of course, she’d had to find him first—he’d disappeared after he’d finished his food—but it had been a quick search. She’d found him trying to teach a young boy how to fix a digital watch in the corner by the desserts table. Sugar and gadgets, no surprise there. Then, the actual introduction had happened, which had involved a great amount of blabbering from Clara and silence from John. Somehow, Clara had managed to give her friends a run-down of her whole complicated timeline with John in a matter of only three breaths. Amy had just gracefully summed it all up.

Clara laughed awkwardly and felt John fidgeting at her side. “No, I think that’s basically it.”

“Well, then. That’s properly weird. But I suppose we expect weird from Clara. She once dated a guy who never wore anything that wasn’t tweed or a bowtie. Nice to meet you, John.”

John simply stood and nodded until Clara elbowed his side. “Oh, right. Er. It’s my pleasure. Congratulations on your husband.”

Clara winced at his botched attempt to congratulate Amy, but the bride-to-be didn’t seem to mind. Neither did Bill. In fact, they both chuckled at his comment.

“I like your boots, mate. Very punk.” Bill pointed down at his signature brogue boots.

“I think I might have stolen them from a reverse-cyborg,” John answered perfectly seriously.

Clara watched as Bill paused for a split second before bursting out into laughter. “You’re one of Clara’s strange finds, alright. What in the world is a reverse-cyborg and where can I find one in England?”

Clara felt herself sag in relief as she watched John pull Bill aside and engage her in his wild story-telling.

She loved watching him tell stories. He always waved his hands about, gesticulating wildly to emphasize a point or reenact something, bobbed up and down on his toes, and let his eyebrows do as they pleased. It was a spectacle of its own, making everything he said come to life. Bill looked at him like he was weaving the greatest narrative she’d ever heard.

“You really do like him, don’t you?”

Clara turned away from John and Bill to look at Amy. “Of course I do. He’s one of my best friends.”

“I noticed the change in you after Christmas almost immediately, you know. I just thought it was because of your time away.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you seemed so much more hopeful when you came back from Edinburgh. You’d seemed so far away for so long before then.” Amy glanced meaningfully at John, and Clara followed her gaze, remaining silent. “I may not get it. Maybe no one will ever really understand the idea of you and him as a unit. It’s probably all kinds of complicated.”

As Amy spoke, Clara thought about everything that irrevocably bound her and John together. She watched him—in all his skinny, Scottish, gray-haired glory—flit back and forth in front of Bill’s eyes. She chuckled as he picked up a spoon from a nearby table and began to talk about the curvature of space itself. Maybe they really were a unit.

“But I don’t think that matters. You just seem so… so _good_ right now, Clara. Happy. Present. I think you might need him. And I think that’s what matters.”

With a comforting squeeze to Clara’s shoulder, Amy was off. The venue had emptied out long ago. There were only a few stragglers left behind, silently chatting with each other.

Standing from the table at which she had sat to watch over John and Bill, Clara approached her two friends. He was no longer holding the spoon, seemingly winding down to the end of his rant about the geometry of space, when Clara arrived at their side.

“Alright, John. I think it’s time to let Bill get some sleep.”

Bill smiled at both of them. “Thanks for the chat, mate. It was totally _awesome_. Goodnight to the both of you.”

With that, she was off as well, and Clara and John were left standing on their own.

She looked up at him. He gently tipped his head towards the exit, and they fell into step with each other as they left the venue.

“Would you like to take a walk with me? It’s still nice out.” Clara hoped she sounded as casual as she usually did.

He nodded.

It was well and truly dark out, but because the estate was currently full of people, the grounds around the main building were bathed in the warm light that poured out from the windows of occupied rooms. They wandered about the edges of the light in the grass, brushing shoulders, delicately brushing hands.

“I can hardly remember the last time I saw this place with all its lights on. I was probably a wee lad,” he spoke softly into the night.

“Why haven’t you ever come back?”

“It’s complicated. A lot of pain tied up here.”

“Sorry.”

He shook his head, and they walked on in silence as Clara contemplated the potential parallels between their conversation and the way that they straddled the edges of the light pouring out onto the ground. Something about knowledge shared and secrets kept, a play between light and shadow.

They turned a corner, and they became bathed in the warm lights pouring out from the large drawing room windows. She spoke up again.

“I’m glad you came with me. Thank you for coming with me.”

“Clara Oswald, I would do anything for you.”

She glanced up at him as they walked and saw him smiling softly at her. One of those smiles that made her feel full and warm and nearly overwhelmed.

Emboldened, Clara gently took his hand in hers, like he did sometimes when they were running about. Only there was no running now, just damp grass and quiet steps and warm lights that made his silver hair look yellow.

She felt a tiny stutter in his step, and then nearly stopped walking herself as she felt him hesitantly shift her hold on his hand so that he could softly weave his fingers through hers. She could clearly see her hand tangled up with his—hers bathed in the light from the windows, his shadowed next to her body.

She’d never thought that holding hands could affect her this much.

“I think I’d die to save you, John. I think I’d do it more than once.”

“Clara.”

Oh, her name. In his voice, on his tongue. It made her _feel_ things.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d died for you before, actually. In some other life, in some other universe. I think we’re tied together, you and I.”

He stopped her from continuing their meandering, pulling gently on their joined hands. She turned to look up at him.

He wasn’t smiling anymore. No, he looked like he might just be falling apart. His eyes were shining, his mouth pressed tightly shut, his throat bobbed as he swallowed.

“Clara, I can’t–”

She watched him struggle for a moment before stepping closer to him and using her free hand to cup his face.

“It’s alright, you stupid old man.”

He leaned into her touch, and she ran her thumb over his cheek. His eyes slipped shut, and a shaky breath worked its way out from his body. She let her hand fall after a moment, and he opened his eyes again, making intense contact with her own.

“You don’t understand. You’re everything. You’re impossible. I’d let the world fall to pieces for the sake of you.”

“You won’t have to.”

She took another step closer to him, all the while maintaining eye contact. He swallowed again, looked truly ready to fall to pieces as concern and fear and passion tore away at him.

She grasped his lapel, pulling him down, pulling him closer.

“ _Clara_ –”

“John.”

And she kissed him. She felt his surprisingly soft, dry lips against her own, felt his nose bump hers, his breath warming her face.

He whimpered. He sounded like he’d been struck, like her kiss was somehow burning. Like he was overwhelmed to the point of pain, as if he could have let a sob out into her mouth.

She pulled back for a second and very softly, very slowly kissed him again. He barely responded, other than desperately squeezing the hand that he was still holding, but Clara didn’t mind.

She pulled back properly after the second one, landing back flat on her feet, letting go of his coat’s lapel. She looked into his eyes unrepentantly, and found his expression holding a strange mixture of pain and hunger and overwhelming affection.

She squeezed his hand, running her thumb up and down his own, and tugged on it to encourage him to continue walking.

She thought she’d feel more panicked or excited about having kissed her best friend with which she might be coming to realize she’s in love, but all she felt was contentment and something rather like peace. Like something was finally starting to fall into place. There were still loads of things to sort out, yes. But this conversation had been an important one, and she still had his hand in hers and his steps next to her own, and that felt like progress.

Eventually, after a moment of comfortably silent wandering, they somehow mutually decided to return inside for some much-needed sleep. He walked her to her door, since she still wasn’t entirely sure where it was, and paused outside of it.

“Goodnight, Clara.”

Quickly this time, she tugged on his jacket so she could kiss him on the cheek. She beamed up at him.

“Goodnight.”

\---

In hind sight, moving her relationship with John in a new, uncharted, somewhat awkward direction the night before Dave and Linda were scheduled to arrive and meet him was probably not the greatest idea. It was Saturday morning, and the wedding guests were all starting to gather for breakfast. Clara was standing with Bill, surreptitiously looking around for her plus-one—starting to get antsy about whether or not he’d show up and whether or not it was because of last night—when her eyes caught the sight of an unfortunately familiar blonde head of hair.

Linda.

Now, Clara wished she’d somehow communicated to John that her father and his wife would be around for the breakfast situation. If only to encourage him to try to comb his hair. Too late for that now. She’d been spotted by the wicked step mother.

“Clara! There you are. Not depressed anymore? Looks like you’ve regained some of that weight you’d lost!”

Clara had never wanted to hit someone as much as she so desperately wanted to sucker punch Linda right in her crooked teeth. Leave it to her father’s wife to somehow work her response to Danny’s death and her current figure into one pointed comment.

“Linda. Hi. Where’s my dad?”

“Getting our bags to our room. Now tell me, where’s this plus-one of yours? It’s been long enough since the last one.”

“John’s just my friend. And I don’t know where he is because I don’t control him.” Clara tried to make her comment as pointed as possible.

Linda knew.

Once Dave had shown up, Clara effectively ignored her father's wife. They’d sat down with plates full of eggs and toast and jam, and she angled herself in her seat to face her dad. She caught up with him happily, talking about his new favorite books and movies, laughing about his stupid sweater vest (courtesy of Linda), downing cup after cup of tea.

She’d nearly forgotten that John hadn’t shown up until she heard Linda practically screech at her back.

“ _Excuse me!_ That’s my cup, you can’t just take it! What do you think this is? How did you even get in here?”

Clara turned to see John taking a sip from what was apparently Linda’s cup of tea and subsequently flinched as he spit it back into the cup. Probably not sweet enough for him. She watched him place it back down like he was only doing what Linda had asked of him. She probably thought he was a vagrant. The tartan trousers, raggedy graphic t-shirt, and mess of curls probably didn’t help.

“Well that’s a moronic question, I came in through the back window.”

“I’m going to call the police for trespassing.” She paused. “Did you say _window_?”

“Doors are boring. Very not me.”

Clara stepped in before the situation got any worse. Not that she really thought it could.

“He’s not trespassing, Linda. He’s a part of the wedding party.”

“Who would ever invite such a ridiculous man? Rude, poorly dressed, frankly just a little–”

Clara cut her off before she let herself really get going. “Me! Me. I invited him. This is my plus-one. Linda meet John.”

The look of shock and disgust on Linda’s face made Clara want to laugh. She bit her lip to hold it in.

“Ah, Linda. That explains it. I’ve heard horrible things.” John’s whole countenance was cross.

Clara did laugh that time. God, sometimes she hated his complete social ineptitude, but sometimes she just adored it. It reminded her that, every once in a while, it wasn’t necessary to try to please people. Especially people who were already mean-spirited and judgmental.

Right as Linda looked like she was going to explode, Dave jumped in.

“John, is it? Nice to meet you. I’m Dave, Clara’s dad.” He held out his hand for John to shake, but pulled it back when it became clear that John wasn’t the hand-shaking type. “Now, I think my wife and I have to go do some unpacking. Don’t we, sweetheart?”

Dave stood and took Linda’s hand. The couple had turned and were about to leave when John spoke up.

“It’s my pleasure, Dave. Clara’s told me great things.”

Dave nodded, Linda aggressively huffed, and they took off towards their room.

“That was a proper mess. Don’t think that could have gone worse, really.”

“Don’t be daft, I could have been naked.”

Clara blushed but burst out into loud, relieved laughter. It may not have gone well, but at least it was over. She turned to look at her companion.

“Where were you earlier? Have you eaten?”

“Oh! You’ll like this.” He turned on his boot-clad feet and waved his hands. “I was setting up the telescope in the barn.”

She smiled in excitement. “Will we get to use it tonight?”

“I did some calculations, and I chose the best configuration to be able to look at the stars for the next two days.”

“Anything cool happening in the cosmos today?”

“There are always wonders to be seen in the sky, Clara.”

She watched him glance out the window, towards the moon that could still be spotted in the bright blue sky, and was struck with an image of the little kid she’d seen in the photographs at this very estate dreaming of the stars, yearning for the wonders of space.

“Well, then. You’ll just have to show me.”

He looked back down to her and smiled. “C’mon. I want some food, and I heard there are going to be games before the ceremony. I can probably find a way for you to win all of them, which is a credit to me really, given your miniature height.”

She playfully shoved him and took his hand as they made their way outside.

\---

The afternoon had been wonderful.

After breakfast, some of the party guests had gathered outside for games. The live band that Clara had vetted with Missy all those months back had been invited to play, and they had made the early afternoon competition more lively and fun.

John had been her partner for some of the games that had required it, and he’d done a decent job despite all his grumbling and complaining when Clara didn’t listen to his instructions. They hadn’t won the prize at the end of it all, but she’d spent nearly the whole time laughing at his awkward running and flittery hands and cross eyebrows.

Overall, it had been a great success.

Then, everyone who had participated in the games had been forced to rush inside to shower and get ready for the ceremony, which had been scheduled to start at 5pm. Through some miracle, Clara and everyone else had managed to effectively clean up and dress up for the occasion, which had taken place outdoors, on the edge of Loch Lomond, with the sun beginning to paint the sky orange and pink.

Clara had managed to let only a few tears slip, and she’d been grateful to feel John’s hand hesitantly take her own. He had managed to be still throughout the whole ceremony, and Clara had leaned her head on his shoulder when Amy and Rory had finally sealed the deal. It had been a beautiful wedding.

Now, everyone was at the reception, some starting to stand from their tables as the speeches were over and the food was finished and the DJ that Bill had hired was starting to play some lively music. Amy and Rory had officially completed their couple's dance, and those who were tipsy enough to do so were choosing to join them on the dance floor.

Clara watched people having fun and getting sweaty, and thought about asking John to dance. He hadn’t been drinking, but he’d had a lot of cake, and she thought that maybe the sugar would get him amped up for a turn about the room.

He’d cleaned up even better for the wedding than he had for the dinner. He had chosen a maroon velvet coat, which she’d never seen before, but which lended him an air of elegance. He wore a crisp white shirt underneath, a polished belt, and pressed black trousers. She’d been forced to admit to herself that she found him quite handsome.

She turned to look at her dashing plus-one, who was building a pyramid out of the abandoned name cards left at their table, and decided to ask. “Would you dance with me?”

He looked up, startled. “You mean bouncing around like those pudding brains?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to contemplate it for a second and nodded. “If you’d like.”

“I would.”

She smiled determinedly and dragged him behind her to the dance floor. Some classic Queen song came on, which got people excited, and she forced John to move with her. She laughed as he chose to do jazz hands and shuffle his feet.

She forced him to stay for two songs, about which he inevitably grumbled, but he did as he was told. He was almost always 'all bark and no bite'.

It was fun and alive and frankly a bit of a mess, but the two songs were worth it. The instant it was over, John grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the dance floor.

“Now we get to have my kind of fun.”

She followed him as he guided them outside, wandering in the dark towards some unknown destination.

After a few minutes of stumbling about in the dark, Clara reflected that if she were with any other man, she’d likely feel some sort of anxiety or fear. After all, she was wandering around outdoors, moving away from a party of people in absolute darkness.

But then, as she consciously thought about the weight of her hand in John’s, she knew she had no reason to be afraid. Not here. Not with him.

“Where are we going?”

“The barn.”

“Where is this barn? I don’t remember seeing one.”

“That’s because it’s on the edge of the property. We’ll be there soon.”

When they got there, Clara was struck by how plain it was. It was just a regular wooden barn. No paint, no signs, no anything.

Letting go of her hand, John walked up to the door and pushed it in. She followed him as he guided her up onto a raised platform, where he’d set up the telescope and some blankets and a lantern.

She couldn’t help but notice how he moved about the space. The way he knew where to step and what to grab onto and where to find everything. It was intimately familiar to him, like he didn’t really have to think about his movements, similar to the way someone will always know the layout of their childhood home.

“I want to show you something.”

John was kneeling in front of the telescope, gesturing for her to join him. She walked over, took her heels off, and sat down at his side to look through the lens.

She gasped. “Is that Saturn?”

“It is. It’s one of the hardest planets to see with the naked eye, you know. Because it sits right in the thickest part of the Milky Way. It’s surrounded by stars.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It is.”

John spent the next few hours of their night showing her his favorite parts of the night sky, from planets, to their moons, to the stars that made up constellations. He told her about their origins and their magnitude and how far away they were from everything. He even told her the myths behind the constellations and how the moon ended up in the sky, painting pictures with his voice and his hands.

Eventually, he moved the telescope out of the way, and just let her take in the full magnitude of the Milky Way galaxy in the sky. He told her the stories that he’d made up about it when he was a kid—animatedly described all of the alien races he’d created and all of the adventures he’d had—until his voice tapered off, and he turned to look at her with an expression weighed down by a very old, very deep pain. The silence pressed in around them until John finally chose to speak.

“I don’t like the estate because I used to sleep out here when I was a boy. When I came to visit in the summers, and Missy and the others were all still around, I used to get sent out here. This was where I was allowed to daydream as much as I wanted.”

Hesitantly, he reached out for her hand and pulled it up towards the sill below the large open window. He gently guided her fingers so that they skidded over the mottled texture of what felt like a carving.

She grabbed the lantern and lifted it up to the sill, taking in the childish scrawl that had remained etched in the wood since it was carved in decades back. She thought about the significance of something like that.

“…Gallifrey?”

“That’s what I used to call this place, in my head.”

Clara wanted to cry. He really had been alone for practically all of his life. “I’m so sorry, John. They’re horrible for that.”

Her voice came out watery and strained and just a tiny bit angry. He noticed.

“Silly Clara. You weren’t even alive back then. Why should you be sorry?” He spoke gently.

“Your family should have never done that to you. They’re supposed to be your people, the ones who love and support you. You deserve so much _more_ than that. You _have_ to believe me.”

John looked into her eyes and shuffled closer to her on his knees. He looked infinitely sad.

“Look at you. With your eyes, and your never giving up, and your anger, and your kindness. If I ever lost you, I don’t think I would be able to breathe.”

He tugged her into his chest, and she buried her face in his shirt, breathing in his scent, feeling the warmth of his body. She felt him nuzzling the top of her head, very lightly pressing his lips to her hair.

She pulled away from his chest to look into his eyes, and found them to be the bluest things she’d ever seen. Bluer even than the sky they’d just been exploring.

He gently cupped her jaw, and pulled her towards himself.

This time, he kissed her. His mouth latched onto her lower lip, softly tugged on it.

She returned the kiss gently, but fiercely, and heard him make a small sound at the back of his throat.

Then, she was overcome with the miracle that was John kissing her with all of his passion and his sadness, carding his long fingers through her hair, making small noises of contentment against her mouth that reverberated through her. She was overwhelmed by the sheer pleasure of feeling his hot breath mingling with her own, of tugging on his lips in an attempt to own them, of placing her hands over his skinny chest and running them up to his curly hair.

She hadn’t known the world could feel the way that it did when she was kissing John, sharing hesitant touches. The way she felt that they were inherently tied to those stars, and his stories, and the here and now, and the past, and the future.

They spent the night sharing kisses and intimate touches and secrets while looking up at the Milky Way from a barn that a lonely little boy had named Gallifrey.

She couldn't focus on it now, not while she rested her head on John's shoulder and felt his heartbeat through his shirt, but she knew that there was something there. Something that linked his past, his present, and his future self. Something about hurting and healing. Something like a worn carving in wood—sharp and well defined when first scratched in, softened at its edges over time, but never quite losing its shape. Maybe it was all about the stars, and the fact that they were looking down on John once again—in the same barn, decades into his own future, no longer alone, but somehow still the same sad, imaginative, and passionate boy.

Neither of them said it, but they both felt that the love they shared could destroy everything around them—the barn, the stars, even each other—unless they finally talked about it. In the dim light of the moon, it pulsed and it pulled and it thrashed around them, begging to be acknowledged.

Right as she was falling asleep, in the eye of the storm of their hearts and their souls, Clara ran her fingers over the exposed skin of John’s forearms, mapping his body from his wrists to his elbows, where her fingers hit the edges of his rolled-up sleeves.

“I love you, John.”

“I love you, too.”

The world settled.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still not totally convinced that I like how this chapter is constructed, but my brain can't handle messing with it anymore. Also, as a fair heads up, there are mentions of sex at the end of this chapter.
> 
> I believe I'm only going to add one more chapter after this one (two max), and then this absolute mess of a story will be finished.
> 
> Thanks to those who have stuck with it!

That weekend in Scotland changed things for the both of them.

The gloomy, clouded morning that had followed their night in the barn had seen Clara and John wandering back to the estate in their crumpled clothes from the previous afternoon as the other wedding guests packed up to leave.

After sharing breakfast in the silence of the emptied estate, they’d taken a walk in the damp grass, and he’d told her about his favorite parts of his childhood summers—the ice cream, the rain, and the loch. He’d shown her the places he used to climb and silently confessed the things that used to scare him (“The dark, Clara. It was always the deep and lovely dark. But we’d never see the stars without it, would we?”).

He’d even told her about his complicated relationship with Missy and how she’d been his very best friend when he was ‘wee’. He’d gone on and on about how they’d used to run around, how she’d get him into trouble, and how he’d get her to play Scots vs Aliens with him. He’d even mumbled that she’d been the only person that had visited him out in the barn, and Clara had gained a small degree of appreciation for the madwoman in purple.

Because of the overcast sky, they hadn’t been able to look at the stars on their last night. Instead, they’d made a bonfire, and Missy had come out to join them with what tasted like grain alcohol that had numbed Clara’s tongue. Throughout the night, Missy had alternated between ignoring the fact that they were sitting so closely together and pretending to gag at the sight of it. It had been somehow both irritating and amusing.

Clara had watched as John and Missy rapidly switched between lightheartedly joking and angrily arguing with each other, and had come to the conclusion that she could never really hope to understand their bond. Anyway, she’d enjoyed seeing John interact with someone who had a real connection to him. It had made him seem less like a drifting, lone soul.

At the end of it all, without having talked about it, Clara had guided John back to her room with a soft grip on his fingers. They hadn’t switched any lights on or even bothered changing out of their clothes, they’d just crawled into the bed and faced each other under the sheets.

She had gently kissed every part of his face, and he’d traced her neck with his fingers.

She’d then unbuttoned his shirt and nuzzled his narrow chest, warming her cold fingers on the skin over his heart. She’d felt its beat double.

“What are you doing?” His chest had vibrated as he’d asked his question, and Clara had felt it through her fingers and her nose.

“I’m reading your heart.”

“And?”

“I’m just as scared as you are, I think.”

He’d wound his arms around her and had pulled her body into his own. “Clara. My Clara.”

She’d fallen asleep with the smell of smoke in her nose and the feeling of his chest slowly rising and falling against her.

They’d left Scotland early the next day, hearts irreversibly tied together.

\---

Things were difficult and beautiful and oh so satisfying after that.

They fumbled and argued their way through figuring out how to be together.

John had rapidly begun to draw away from her after he’d noticed people throwing judgmental looks at her in public, which Clara had swiftly corrected by very surely (and quite loudly) reminding him that she didn’t give a rat’s arse about what people thought or said or wanted. He’d gotten a gleeful glint in his eye as she’d done her shouting, and had almost instantly gone back to holding her hand and touching her arm with no reservations.

Clara tried to get John to spend nights at her apartment, but he refused. They argued about space and time and about how they could conceivably share as much of it as possible with each other. Sometimes, it felt impossible. They both wanted the same exact thing, but couldn’t agree on how to get it. It was almost worth pulling her own hair out.

It took a month and a half for her to decide that she was going to move in with him (he’d had little say in the matter), but it took them both so much longer than that to figure out how it would work.

She yelled at him for never remembering to lock his door, and he yelled at her for being so controlling. She swore every time that she tripped over his boots, and he grumbled angrily when he saw that she’d moved things around in his study.

She regularly argued with her dad about the propriety of her relationship, and felt horrible when she watched John flinch and deflate any time he overheard their heated discussions.

They had countless heavy and painful conversations about Danny and River and their respective hangups. Some of those conversations ended in gentle touches, some in shouting, and some in absolute and deafening silence.

Nevertheless, despite all the obstacles, an undercurrent of tender affection and furious love weaved its way into every moment of their shared lives.

He kissed her like no other ever had or ever would—like he knew he might lose her any minute and his desperation at the very thought of it overflowed and consumed them both. It made her short of breath, and sometimes, it even made her want to take his side in an argument.

She made him his disgustingly sweet tea and placed it on his desk when they spent their afternoons together—her doing her marking, him reading or scribbling out calculations.

They made each other toast and bought each other biscuits.

At night, she dragged him away from whatever he was doing and forced him into bed. She’d curl herself around him and encourage him to sleep because he so rarely chose to do it himself. He still slept so much less than her, waking in the small hours of the morning, but she suspected he slept more than he had in a very long time.

In the mornings, he snuck weird things into her purse when she wasn’t looking. Every so often, she’d reach in and find his completed clockwork squirrel, an old book that she’d mentioned she loved, or a doodle of her face. They never failed to make her smile like an idiot.

Everyday, he bared new parts of himself to her. She greedily absorbed all of his hesitantly offered information and trapped it in her heart, which only became more and more full of him.

Everyday, she showed him that he was worth loving out loud. He smiled so tenderly and so much more often, even as he kept his grumpy and standoffish ways with strangers.

When they were safely at home, he stripped off his extra layers and rolled up his sleeves or wore his soft t-shirts. She liked to run her fingers over his alabaster skin, soft and warm, feeling the life held within his wiry muscles and his pulsing veins. She liked the reminder that he was so trusting of her.

He liked to play with her fingers and run his nose along her hairline, pressing his lips to her forehead. He liked to kiss her behind her ear no matter what they were doing.

They loved each other more than anything.

\---

Months after having moved in, Clara woke up in their warm bed, wearing flannel trousers and a t-shirt that she’d stolen from him, and very suddenly realized that she genuinely thought of this old place and the things held within it as _theirs_. Their bed, their bedroom, their home. She smiled as she untangled herself from the sheets.

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she wandered down the narrow corridor outside of their bedroom and paused at the top of the rickety stairs. Today was her birthday. From the landing, she could hear the Beatles playing from the kitchen, and she could smell something rather like burnt toast.

As she slowly made her way down each creaky step, carefully feeling the rough and smooth texture of worn wood under her cold bare feet, she let herself recall a time when she’d wandered down the stairs of another home. Her thoughts drifted to those long-ago mornings in that other time, when there had been rough carpet beneath her feet and her mum’s singing drifting from the kitchen. Those times when her mum had made her waffles for her birthday before rushing her off to another day at school.

She landed back in the present as she landed at the bottom of the stairs, where the smells weren’t warm spice or floral perfume or the sweetness of syrup anymore. The present where, instead, she found the greatest love of her life grumbling to himself over the fact that the toaster had “betrayed” him. Where her nose noted the acrid smell of burnt bread, the earthy scent of old books, and the slight tang of fresh marmalade.

His hair was curled and messy, his eyes light blue and mellow. He wore some old Bowie t-shirt and a pair of his most worn tartan trousers as he walked around their kitchen just as barefoot as she was. He looked soft and comfortable, and perhaps best of all, he looked at home.

Clara wandered up behind him and wrapped her arms around his slender waist, burying her nose in the shoulder of his soft t-shirt, taking in the smell of _him_ in the mornings.

He’d stopped tensing up when she hugged him months ago. Now, he only softly laid his hands over her own and turned in her arms so that he could look at her.

He smiled softly and planted a kiss behind her ear.

“Happy Birthday, Clara Oswald.”

“Oh it is, isn’t it? Nearly forgot, honestly.” She let her eyes wander over the kitchen counters and realized that he’d made a massive mess. She chuckled. “Is that why you’ve practically destroyed the kitchen?”

“I was trying to make you breakfast. Every appliance in here is a disgrace.” His eyebrows did that very cross thing that they often did.

Her eyes landed on what looked like the remnants of a toaster, and she thumped the back of his head. “What have you done to the poor toaster, you great idiot? What am I supposed to eat for breakfast now?”

He’d evidently brought his favorite screwdriver out and taken it apart—something that he did with their appliances frustratingly often.

He scratched the back of his neck as he mumbled his response. “I was only trying to fix it. Turns out it was fine.” He reached behind him and sheepishly added: “I bought you jaffa cakes?”

Seeing the bright purple box held in his hands as a peace offering, she laughed and took them from him. “I expect a fully functional toaster back in this kitchen by the end of the week.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She giggled, kissed him on the cheek, and opened the container of biscuits.

In the end, they’d eaten jaffa cakes for breakfast while drinking tea and listening to music, and Clara had told him stories about her mum while running about to get ready for work.

On her way to work, she thought about the marvelous way in which life shifted and changed and somehow still stayed the same. This morning didn’t involve waffles or her mum or making sure she’d done her homework, but it _did_ involve someone she wholeheartedly loved trying to make her breakfast, the music of the Beatles, the taste of something sweet, and the rush to get to school.

She would give just about anything to see her mum again or to relive those mornings in her small childhood kitchen. But she’d _never_ dream of giving up her life with John. Not even those moments when he broke their appliances or left his boots in the middle of the living room.

As far as birthday mornings went, this was the best one she’d had in ages. Broken toaster included.

\---

A few days later, as the weekend finally arrived, John announced that he wanted to take her somewhere for her birthday. Over tea and freshly-made toast (their new toaster looked like a spaceship), she bombarded him with questions, which he mostly evaded, before she finally agreed to his mysterious day trip.

They’d gotten in the ‘TARDIS’ and headed south for a little over three hours before John had finally announced that they’d arrived at their destination.

Clara had tried her best to not have any expectations, but as she got out of the car and took a look around, she couldn’t help but feel very confused and slightly disappointed. All that surrounded them were chilly, small-town streets. Nothing to be seen but rolling hills, small homes, and tiny shops.

“Where are we?”

“You mean you don’t recognize this place?” He spread his arms wide.

She took another look around. Something seemed very vaguely familiar, but nothing particularly stood out. “Er, no. Should I?”

“Why, Clara Oswald, we’re in Steventon!” He gave her one of his most boyish smiles.

“Ah, so a trip for Jane Austen.” She smiled in return. She’d always enjoyed Austen.

“Yes.” He paused and tilted his head. “Well, no. I do think you came here for that reason once, but we’ve made _this_ trip for little you, not for Miss Austen.”

She huffed and pinched his side. “I’m not that small!”

He flinched and rubbed his ribs while he rolled his eyes. “Not your _stature_ , Clara. I mean you when you were wee. _Younger_ you.”

She just stared at him in bafflement. He wasn’t making any sense.

“Come along, then. I’ll show you.” John tangled their fingers together and excitedly guided her down the cobblestone streets before coming to a full stop in front of a small bookshop.

When he guided her inside, Clara was hit with a sense of deja vu. She felt that she’d absolutely, positively, one hundred percent been there before.

“Ring any bells?” John looked at her with hope and a barely contained excitement.

Before answering, she wandered off into the shop, making her way in and out of different aisles, looking up and down the bookshelves. Then, suddenly, it clicked.

“John! I remember this place!” She ran up to him eagerly as he rummaged through a specific shelf. “I must have come here when I was just a kid. I remember my mum brought me here for a weekend because I wouldn’t stop going on about Pride and Prejudice. It was the first time I can remember leaving Blackpool.”

He turned around when he seemed to have finally found what he was looking for. “If I remember correctly, you were twelve the last time you were here.”

Her eyebrows drew together in confusion. “How would you know that?”

He stared at her with an unfathomable look in his eyes as she mentally shuffled through what she could remember from that day.

She remembered having lunch with her mum after finishing a Jane Austen themed walkabout. After that, she remembered having wandered into this bookshop while her mum made small talk with some lady outside. She recalled looking around for the shelf where all the Austen books were held and then feeling uncommonly outraged after running into some man that had been rudely writing in the pages of her favorite author’s works.

Then, it hit her like a slap in the face. She couldn’t recall what he’d looked like beyond the basics, but she could remember that he’d been skinny, tall, and Scottish.

“That was _you_? _You_ were the one writing in all the books? How is that even possible? Why have you never mentioned this before?”

He smiled brightly and echoed her own words back to her. “We’re tied together, you and I.”

She gazed at him in disbelief. She wished that she could remember exactly what he’d looked like back then. Exactly what he’d said. “I remember yelling at you, I think. For writing in the books.”

He laughed out loud and responded. “You were just as self-assured then as you are now. Probably just as much of a bossy literature fanatic, too.”

“Oi!” She tried frowning (and largely failed).

He then held out the book that he’d been holding behind his back. “Happy Birthday, Clara.”

She looked down. _Sense and Sensibility_.

She gently slid her hand over the worn cover and flipped through its yellowed pages. She gasped and then chuckled. Filling most of the margins were comments and question marks and unnecessary suggestions, all penned in the messy scrawl that had become so intimately familiar to her over the last few years.

She gazed at him in wonder and amusement before winding her arms around him in a tight embrace. “Thank you, John.”

It was such an odd birthday present. Something so uniquely theirs. It tied them in such a strange, time-traveling kind of way. It felt like it was a relic of their timeless connection to each other—something that hadn’t changed since she was twelve. She cradled it against her chest as soon as it was paid for.

After their short trip to Steventon, John had driven them back to their home in Liverpool, where Clara had been extremely surprised to find Amy, Rory, and Bill hanging about inside.

The instant she saw her friends sitting around their kitchen table, drinking wine and pouring over their vinyl collection, she’d frozen in her steps and looked to John to confirm that she wasn’t hallucinating.

He gazed down at her with a warmth that flushed her cheeks and gestured for her to join them with a tilt of his head. “Go on. I didn’t let those pudding brains break in here for nothing.”

She giddily ran in and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to music with her best friends while John tried and (mostly) succeeded to make them all supper. After only a few hiccups, they’d all gathered around the table as they shared wine, talked animatedly, and ate surprisingly decent food.

As she watched Bill playfully flick a crumb at John’s face, Clara couldn’t help but feel massive amounts of both surprise and gratitude for the fact that John had invited her best friends into his private space presumably only to make her feel happy and loved for her birthday. She felt a ridiculous amount of love for him well up in her chest as he did his best to be charming while still being slightly rude and hugely geeky.

The hours passed quickly in such truly great company.

At the end of it all, after her tipsy friends had gone, Clara leaned against the kitchen door-frame and watched as John rolled up his sleeves and washed the dishes.

In that moment, Clara was absolutely certain that her heart had physically grown in size throughout the day, taking up more space in her chest than was classically feasible. How was it possible to be so singularly fulfilled by the existence of another person? How was it that one person managed to make her feel _so many_ things?

She thought about his present and smiled. _Know your own happiness_ , it said. It was strange to have her happiness exist outside of her body, but as she gazed at his silver curls and the slope of his shoulders, she thought that maybe it was also perfectly right.

Feeling that washing dishes would be a waste of the scant few hours that remained in their wonderful Saturday, Clara wandered up to John and slowly ran her hands down his back. She wanted to cherish him now, to show him how much she loved him for everything he was and everything he did.

Almost instantly, John stopped what he was doing and let his head drop to his chest in silent submission to her ministrations.

Taking this as her cue, Clara untucked his shirt from his trousers and let her hands sneak up beneath the fabric to touch the warm skin hidden underneath. Gently, she looped her arms around his lanky body and formed patterns on his belly with her fingers, slowly making her way from his navel to his hip bones. As soon as she made it to his narrow hips, she dug the blunt tips of her fingernails into his taut skin and tugged him back towards her shorter body.

He shivered.

“ _Clara_.”

“Come on, then. We can do clean-up tomorrow. Tonight, I want to try something new.”

He turned around and looked at her with a passion that made her blush and a heat that pooled in her stomach. He tangled their fingers and pressed his warm lips behind her ear, and before he pulled away, he whispered, “I’m yours.”

She felt a delicious shiver run down her spine, and she pulled their tangled hands in the direction of the stairs, feeling excitement and warmth and love bubble through her.

\---

Their first time wasn’t a rushed mess, despite the fact that it was many months in the making. It was slow and intentional and absolutely electrifying.

John had peeled the clothes off of her body like she was someone worth worshiping. Even as his hands had trembled, he hadn’t hesitated for a second as he’d unzipped her skirt and ran his fingers along her bare skin.

He’d hotly kissed and caressed nearly every part of her body, every action executed with purpose and intense focus. By the time that she’d finally pulled him over herself to feel his slender frame fully press hers into the mattress, they’d both been panting and needy from his drawn out touches.

The sex itself had felt like nothing Clara had ever experienced before. It had been overwhelming, almost to the point of breaking her—full to the brim of raw passion and carnal pleasure and deep, abiding love.

They’d both marked each other without knowing it. She’d left stripes all over his back, and a bite on the crook of his neck. He’d left purple marks all along her collarbones and on her breasts, where he’d kissed and sucked and nipped at her skin.

It was all push and pull—an ardent, _gripping_ desire to own and consume that burned molten hot under their skin.

He’d uttered her name like it was etched onto his soul. She was positive she’d done the same.

After they’d come down from it all, she’d placed her head on his sweaty chest and had listened to his heartbeat, running her hand gently down his side. As he’d languidly caressed her spine, Clara had drifted into the land of sleep with the lingering thought that John could have had two hearts for the immense amount of love he held within his ribcage.


	9. Chapter 9

The week following their first time was full of lots of things. Early morning tea, late nights spent exploring each other, and hard conversations.

They agreed pretty quickly that they didn’t think it would be a good idea to have a kid.

In making that decision, there were loads of things that were taken into consideration: his lack of a family (aside from a wildly inconsistent cousin), his age, her general fear of becoming a mother without having her own mum around, her dad’s disapproval of their relationship, his lackluster social skills, her control freak tendencies, etc.

After a number of discussions, they agreed that in the grand scheme of things, a kid didn’t quite fit their life or their timeline. So, generally, Clara and John did their best to avoid a pregnancy. Mostly this just meant birth control and condoms.

They still enjoyed learning new things about each other and continuing to explore the novel physical aspect of their relationship within their own private, peaceful bubble of whispered words of love and lingering touches and the familiar scent of sleep and warm skin.

Within a month, it was Christmas.

They’d had dinner with her dad and his wife, and in the spirit of the season, Dave had been genuinely nice to John. Even with Linda’s dreadful presence getting in the way, watching the two most important men in her life awkwardly smile at each other had made Clara ridiculously merry.

Later in the evening, in her childhood living room, surrounded by bittersweet reminders of her family life when her mum was still around, Clara had gently placed the green paper crown that she’d kept from their Christmas in Edinburgh on John’s now longer and messier curls.

As her hands had lingered to tenderly cradle his head, they had earnestly locked eyes, nonverbally communicating to each other just how grateful they both were that things had changed so much in the span of a year. Gone was the confusion and sense of emotional limbo. Past that particular point of space and time that had felt so transient and impermanent. Now, there remained only the encompassing familiarity of their entangled life.

She had gotten him new strings for his guitar and a lightly used film camera and a funny short poem she’d written about his attack eyebrows. In turn, he’d given her a tiny box containing nothing but a single tangerine and a drawing he’d completed of her and her mum spending Christmas together when she was five. Apparently, he’d had to negotiate with her dad for the reference picture, and she almost loved him more for that than for trying to give her a way to feel closer to her mum on Christmas.

Later that night, in their home, in their bed, they stared at each other as snow began to softly fall outside, blanketing the world in a mellow, cold, and insulating sort of silence.

They _saw_ each other. So clearly, so lovingly, so fully.

She pushed her stockinged feet against his and smiled. They were warm.

\---

As the New Year rolled in, Clara and John attended a party at the Pond residence, which he tolerated with minimal complaining for a good hour before he slunk off to hide. When she found him taking a breather on the steps outside, she leaned into his tall, skinny frame and unabashedly buried her face in the skin of his neck, whispering her words right into his pulsing heartbeat—willing them to reach that most precious organ in his chest faster, carried on the warm blood that coursed through his lanky, beautiful body.

“You are the kindest, most precious person I could have ever had the pleasure of knowing.”

He opened his coat and wrapped it around her, enveloping her in his scent and his warmth.

“Clara. My Clara.” He squeezed her closer to his chest and paused. “You own so much of me, so much of my heart, that you have become my very definition of what it means to be whole.”

She realized right then that he was a greater part of her than she could ever really hope to understand. Her love for him had become something that tugged at her from some place unknown, like his existence and the name of his soul were carved into the inside of her ribs—an indescribable pattern that had imprinted itself on her heart as it had grown inside her chest.

She filled her lungs with the warm air that radiated off of him, reveling in the scent of soap and sugar and faded cologne.

“You make breathing feel alright.”

“Mmm.” In his embrace, she felt his hum surround her.

A quiet, warm moment passed as he ran his nose along her hair and rested his lips softly on her forehead.

“Resolutions for the New Year?” she asked.

“Making resolutions is for pudding brains.”

She chuckled. Of course he felt that way. “Yeah, I suppose it is.”

Clara had closed her eyes and rested her head against his collarbone, having figured that their short conversation had ended, when he suddenly spoke.

“But if I did do that sort of thing, I guess my resolution would be to keep you breathing and laughing and running towards the sun.” He spoke so quietly to her, as if the delicate words weren’t meant to be heard by the world around them. “Oh, and to never eat pears again.”

The people inside counted down, and she smiled into his shirt.

She tilted her head back and sealed a promise to keep him anchored and happy with a lingering kiss to his lips, which had chilled from his time spent outside.

She filled her lungs with his warm breath and welcomed the New Year surrounded by the essence of her favorite person in the entire universe.

\---

By the end of March, their New Year had taken a turn for the very unexpected.

Clara stared at Dr. Jones in absolute disbelief.

“So you mean to tell me that I’m… what exactly?”

“Pregnant. With child. Up the duff.”

“Haha. Very funny. But no. Definitely not.”

“Listen, Clara. I’m not sure what you’d like for me to tell you, but as your GP, I’d like to talk to you about your options once you’ve had a chance to process this information.”

“But how is this even _possible_? Have you met me? I’m impeccably punctual and practically obsessive about taking my birth control at the same time every single day.”

“These cases are honestly very rare. But with most forms of birth control, a small chance of failure exists, no matter how incredibly slight it might be.”

“But John wears condoms.”

“Always?”

“Yes. Definitely.” Clara hesitated, remembered a slightly drunken night in February when she’d practically jumped him in their living room, and paled. “…Shit.”

She began to hyperventilate. Practically the very first thing they’d agreed on once they’d started having sex was that they were not going to have a kid. And as soon as she remembered _that_ fun little fact, she was overwhelmed by the oppressive list of all of the very good, very logical reasons why they’d decided against it and began to panic even more.

Oh shit. Oh _fuck_. She was so screwed. What the actual bloody hell was she supposed to tell John? Should she tell him? How would he react to the real possibility of being a father?

Oh Christ, if _her_ father found out, she would have to run away to another country. Maybe even another planet.

“Clara. Clara! You need to calm down. You need to breathe.”

Clara looked up into the reassuring face of Dr. Jones and tried to match her breathing to her trusted doctor’s exaggerated gestures. She nodded and shook her hands by her sides as she tried to regain control of her diaphragm.

“Listen. It really is going to be okay. You have options and you have a few weeks. Take the time to let this sink in a little bit, talk to your partner, figure out what your situation looks like, and think about what you want. We can set up an appointment to talk about how to move forward from there.” Dr. Jones smiled patiently and compassionately at her.

She took a deep breath and slumped in her seat. She felt better about the situation knowing that she had a GP that genuinely looked out for her, but she felt no better about the actual practical implications of being pregnant and having to discuss that very scary reality with John.

She sighed. “Thanks, Martha. I’ll call to make another appointment soon.”

She left the office in a daze, went home, and walked straight into their upstairs bathroom where she promptly threw up out of pure anxiety and absent-mindedly brushed her teeth. In a numb and tired sort of panic, Clara changed into one of John’s old t-shirts and took a long, undisturbed nap.

\---

Clara kept the whole p-word situation from John for a week before she decided that she couldn’t cope with his soft touches and well-intentioned jokes while hiding such a huge secret.

They were in bed—he was poking fun at her for reading _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ while playing with her hair—when she finally decided that she had to just say it. No lengthy prologue. Just the words, if she could figure out how to shape them.

“John, I’m pregnant.” Her tongue did it without her help.

The moment that followed her declaration hung frozen between them. A moment so fragile and so _important_ that Clara held her breath in an attempt to keep it from shattering all around them. She imagined it would break as spectacularly as a glass window might, and she imagined that they would both end up caught in the cross-fire, the shards of it cutting and scraping their skin as they flew outward from the epicenter of chaos.

His hands slowly pulled away from her, and she watched them fall back to his flannel trousers, forming fists that made his knuckles turn white.

He wasn’t breathing either. His jaw was clenched tight, his eyebrows forming a spectacularly confused and panicked frown, his mouth firmly set in a straight line that did not betray any single emotion in particular.

A minute passed. Another after that one.

“February?”

Clara let her breath rush out of her in sheer relief. This question was an easy one. It didn’t involve tearing each other apart with uncertainty or panic or accusation.

“Yeah. Doctor said this was insanely unlikely, but… I guess that’s just how we are.” She let out a humorless laugh, feeling a rush of anxiety threaten to choke her.

She watched him silently struggle with something for a few minutes before he eventually nodded to himself, as if coming to some sort of decision. He turned to her with his eyebrows resting calmly on his face and his blue eyes clear with a purpose that she couldn’t quite grasp.

“Okay. What do you want, Clara?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ll do whatever you decide, and we’ll do it together.” His hands loosened from his pyjamas and cautiously edged towards her. He took her book, placed it on her nightstand, and fiercely gripped her fingers in his own, as if forcing her to feel that they were tied, that he was there, that she wasn’t floating about in this violent ocean of apprehension on her own.

She teared up in gratitude and fear. “What are we going to _do_?”

He pulled her into his lap, letting her wrap herself around him before he answered. “I don’t think anyone ever really knows what they’re doing.”

“John, this is serious.”

“I _am_ being serious. Pudding brains have wee ones all the time, and most of them turn out harmlessly and spectacularly mediocre.”

For some absurd reason, hearing him talk like that made something in Clara feel lighter. “Are we screw ups?”

“No.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That you’re strong and that your hair smells like flowers.” He nuzzled her hair.

“No, I mean what are you thinking about this… situation?”

“I don’t really think that matters.”

“Of course it matters, you daft old man. You could be a father.”

He let out a soft sigh. “I would be anything for you. I just want you to be here. I just want you to be happy.”

They didn’t speak after that. He just shut off the lights, and she fell asleep wrapped tightly around his wiry body, soothed by his heartbeat and his particular scent of soap and sugar.

\---

She didn’t ever blatantly tell him her decision. Instead, she wandered up to him on a rainy April morning, took his weathered hands in her own and placed them softly on her bare abdomen, under another one of his stolen graphic t-shirts.

Bathed in the yellow light of the lamp on his workbench, surrounded by the pattering sound of raindrops hitting the windows and the roof, she watched his face shift from confused, to surprised, and finally to broken and cautiously ecstatic.

His eyes glittered with unshed tears when they looked up from the miracle of skin meeting skin, from the accidental creation of life to be shared. He stared at her face, as if trying to memorize its every feature, and ultimately met her dark-brown eyes with his own.

“ _Clara_.” His voice was choked and hoarse, and he said nothing else. But he didn’t have to. He’d been communicating with her name alone for as long as she’d known him.

“We’ll teach the little one everything. They’ll be alright.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist, and they held each other in the soft silence of their home, overwhelmed by hesitant happiness and real fear and the absolute certainty that they wouldn’t be alone in this—their most poorly planned adventure yet.

\---

As the months passed, Clara began to hate the inevitable physical side effects of being pregnant. Especially in the late summer months, when everything was hot and sticky and she felt that her center of gravity was all sorts of fucked up and her feet would regularly get swollen.

Sometimes, she’d stare at John hopping on the balls of his feet, looking as tall and as gangly as ever, and she’d feel an urge to slap him for landing her in this position. She’d watch him flit back and forth in their kitchen and internally shout at him for her sore ankles and chubby cheeks. But then he’d turn to look at her with an apologetic smile and a bowl full-to-the-brim of banana slices and milk (a craving she couldn’t get over), and she’d forget all about her raving internal monologue.

She was a bit of a hormonal mess. She regularly and wholeheartedly swung between snipping at him over nothing and crying out of gratitude when he made her toast, which only served to confuse him beyond his usual capacity for confusion. Occasionally though, Clara faced moments of gripping existential doubt and anxiety—mostly when faced with the parts of her pregnancy over which she realized she had absolutely zero control—and John somehow managed to effectively talk her through them (with the help of jaffa cakes and bananas of course).

Overall, they made a surprisingly efficient team, even with his clueless gesturing and confused frowning and her general storm of emotions.

\---

By the time October neared its end, and their delivery date loomed just a few weeks away, John finally took his turn to start freaking out. He’d avoid doing it in her presence—she assumed to keep her from doing the same—but she’d noticed that he’d started picking at his fingernails, zoning out more than usual, and lying in their bed at night without sleeping.

One night in particular, a few days before the start of November, Clara woke up at three in the morning to pee (another hated aspect of her pregnancy), saw him missing from their bed, and wandered the house until she found him in his study.

When she peeked through the open crack of the door, she saw him wildly pacing back and forth, talking to someone over the phone and frantically pulling at his hair.

“—already know that! I’ve gone and messed up her whole life. What if the wee one turns out like _me_? We’ll all be doomed.”

Clara couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation, but she suspected that the person he was speaking to was none other than his deranged cousin.

“Stop laughing, you wicked witch! This isn’t funny.”

Ah, so it _was_ Missy. John didn’t talk to anyone else quite like that.

“No. _No_. Absolutely not. I would give up my keys to the ‘TARDIS’ before allowing that.” A pause. “Because you’re mad!”

A minute passed as Missy spoke, and Clara chuckled as she watched John’s frown turn from casually concerned to downright furious. “I don’t know why I even bothered calling you. You’ve been no help whatsoever. Goodnight.”

As he hung up and pinched the bridge of his nose, letting his head drop in exhaustion and resignation, Clara softly rapped her knuckles on the door and wandered into the room.

“Come on. Let’s go to bed.” She pulled his fingers away from his face and guided him towards the door.

He nodded silently and followed her up the stairs and into their bedroom, where they lay down side by side, facing the ceiling with their hands entwined. Clara waited patiently for him to speak.

“What if one of us goes crazy and leaves this baby?” His voice was hushed.

Clara blinked her eyes open. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what if one of these days I’m electrocuted or something and then my brain turns to pudding and my personality changes and you and this baby are left to fend for yourselves because I’ve gone even more mad than I already am.”

“That won’t happen.”

“You can’t know that, Clara. What if I’m a horrible father? What happens when I die so much sooner than you? It’s not fair. It’s not fair that I get to accidentally have a baby with you when I’m fifty six while there are families out there who can’t manage the same no matter how hard they try.”

“You’re right, John. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that horrible parents still get to be parents and that good parents die when their daughters are sixteen and that we get to have a daughter entirely by accident. But so what?” She turned on her side to face him. “Look. All we can do is try to be really good for this _one_ baby. We don’t have control over much else.”

He urgently turned on his side so that they faced each other. “Well then promise me something. Promise me that you’ll never leave this baby.” His voice was choked and desperate.

“I promise.”

She shuffled closer to him on the bed and rested her head right in front of his own, their faces only inches apart. She stared into his panicked eyes with compassion.

“I’m terrified, Clara.”

She reached out and held his hand, taking a moment to think of what to say. She’d been scared shitless throughout basically this whole process, and she’d only recently come to terms with the fact that certain things were out of their control. Any sanity that she’d managed to maintain up til now had been thanks to John—this wonderful madman who would do absolutely anything to be what she needed.

She only had to return the favor. Just with words. Just wielding the tool that she’d dedicated her life to teaching.

“Being afraid is alright, you know… Because if you’re very wise and very strong, fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind.” She paused to carefully mold her words around the shape of the powerful image she had in her head. “I think we’re always going to be afraid when it comes to her. Even if we learn to hide it. But that’s okay. Because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring us home.”

He stared at her as if, somewhere inside of her, she held all of the deepest and truest secrets of the universe.

He slid his face towards hers, his nose just barely brushing her own, and she watched him fall asleep as peace settled over him for the first time in weeks.

\---

Their daughter was born just over a week before Clara’s own birthday.

She was alarmingly quiet and jelly-baby pink and had the tiniest little fingers, but she was healthy and she was beautiful and she was _theirs_.

They named her Rain.

She took over their lives with all the subtlety and life-affirming force of a sudden spring shower.

\---

Their shared home changed as soon as they’d carried their daughter through the threshold. It wasn’t a space to hold just the two of them anymore. It was a space that would have to fit the awe-inspiring, scary, and humbling wonder that was watching a child grow up.

Clara spent entire afternoons reading their little one stories and whiled away countless hours just playing with her toes and tickling her soft baby belly. She wholeheartedly cherished those moments when she fed their daughter while leaning against John as they sat together on their living room sofa—a strange but wonderful little unit curled around their newest member.

Sometimes, she teared up when she looked into Rain’s curious, brown eyes and thought about what it _meant_ that their daughter existed. That somehow the all-encompassing connection that she shared with the idiot man who ran around in tartan trousers would live on in the universe in this precious little human who shared their DNA. That their unfathomable love had resulted in this person who would become someone so much greater than either one them alone because she would be both of them and neither of them at the same time.

Clara felt the love that she shared with John grow bigger in space and time than she’d ever thought possible. She could almost _see_ it fill up every tiny nook and cranny in their creaky old home, making it feel like they’d landed themselves on some other plane, in some other dimension, where the only thing that mattered was their little family.

She _adored_ watching him be a father.

When their daughter couldn’t fall asleep or wouldn’t stop whimpering, John quietly played her songs on his acoustic guitar. He’d just stand over her cot and look down right into her eyes and softly sing in that Scottish brogue of his, and almost always, their daughter would calm and her breathing would even.

When Clara played with their baby daughter on their living room floor, John snuck up behind her and made ridiculous faces and tried to scientifically explain why cats meowed and why lions couldn’t purr to an eight-month-old. Their daughter always chuckled and gazed at him like he was a curious thing indeed.

Sometimes, in the very early mornings, when John woke up and Clara slept on, he’d take their little daughter outside to sit on their small patio as the sun made its full appearance. When Clara eventually wandered downstairs, she’d find John tenderly holding their baby close to his chest, whispering things that she couldn’t hear. As he spoke, he would laugh and frown and smile, and Clara got the sense that he told their daughter things that he didn’t tell anyone. Secrets about the sun and the world and his stupid blue car.

She loved him desperately for looking at their daughter like she was both the scariest and the loveliest thing that he’d ever laid eyes on.

Their first year of Rain resulted in an entire ocean of moments that Clara regularly wished she could swim in forever.

\---

Her parents weren’t married.

She always got the sense that people thought her parents were weird—both as people and as a couple—but Rain never really paid them any mind.

They were mostly pudding brains, anyway.

Today was her seventh birthday, which meant that some of those pudding brains would be making an appearance at her house later. She wasn’t really looking forward to that, but she _was_ excited about the presents and the sweets that she’d get at her party. (She’d convinced Mum to make her a banana cake in the shape of a worm, and Dad said he’d built the missing piece for her bedroom’s spaceship fort.)

It was all going to be _brilliant_ (Mum had taught her that word last week).

After she finished brushing her teeth and rinsing exactly three times, she crept down the stairs to see if she could sneak up on her dad. Usually, Mum was still sleeping in the morning, and Dad was doing something cool like building clockwork creatures.

This morning, her dad wasn’t in his workshop. Rain frowned at her wasted efforts in tip-toeing and decided to sneak her way to the kitchen.

On her tummy (because she was a spy), she wriggled her way to the kitchen door, where she saw her mum flicking flour at her dad.

“You’re going to ruin this cake, you know.” Her mum laughed in that funny way she only ever heard when her dad was around. “Then, I’ll have to tell your daughter that she won’t have a birthday cake because her poor old dad couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”

“Oh, _my_ daughter, is she?”

She saw her mum’s feet turn towards her dad's. “She calls people pudding brains, John.”

“Well, _Clara_ , she also has a penchant for refusing to do as I say. I think that one’s yours.”

Rain quietly stood up right as her dad was placing a kiss behind her mum’s ear. Gross.

“Ours, then. She’s ours. Always will be.” Her mum’s voice was soft and happy, like it was when she made her a drawing.

“Promise?” She watched as her dad rubbed his nose alongside her mum’s, and Rain wondered if that was a weird adult-thing.

“I do.”

Her parents then started snogging, at which point Rain made it perfectly clear just how gross she thought _that_ adult-thing was.

\---

Throughout her life, she’d heard her parents constantly make promises to each other. Some silly (“Do you promise to let me teach our daughter the lure and the wonder of space?”), some serious (“I promise that I’ll never, ever leave you.”), and some just uniquely their own (“Promise that you’ll remember me, clever boy. No matter where you go.”).

Her parents never married, though.

She learned everything from them, anyway. She took no shit, just like her mum, and she was kind to her core, just like her dad. She was amazing with words and loved big bulky boots, and she had big brown eyes framed by expressive eyebrows. She loved to ask questions and solve complex problems, but she was quiet and (mostly) polite.

Pieces of them were inherently tangled up in who she was. She was them, while she also wasn’t.

So no. Her parents had never married. But as she looked upon her dad’s oldest clockwork creature (she was fairly certain that it was a squirrel) and her mum’s beat-up, annotated Jane Austen novel (she never really liked Sense and Sensibility), she _knew_. She knew it like she knew that her favorite fruit had always been and would always be bananas.

Her parents were bound together in some immeasurable, profound way that existed outside of the normal bounds of space and time. The madman and the impossible woman and their accidental daughter.

She looked down at her big, black boots and smiled with her single dimple.

John and Clara. The Doctor and The Schoolteacher. Her dad and her mum. They would be bound that way forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was it lads! Hopefully you guys dig the ending. I'm not so good with those. Nor the middle part. But it's over now! Thanks for the comments and the encouragement. It was fun to write this while knowing some people would appreciate it.


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